[TUHS] RIP Ken Iverson

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Fri Oct 23 20:59:42 AEST 2015


Dan,

I wrote:
Quiz for the occasion: which major Unix utility adopted IPL's
unprecedented expression syntax?

You correctly responded:
troff.
I suppose, in a sense, that 'dc' also fits the bill but given that that is
inherent in it's stack based nature, I doubt that is what you meant.

The notion of precedence pertains specifically to infix notation, so
postfix dc is definitely not in the running.
Idle thought about my typo: Though APL is famously inscrutable, IPL
(specifically IPL-V) outshined it in that department.

Doug



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