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Comment by threwawasy1228 | Hacker News Reader

I've personally found GNU APL to be a bit flimsy, and not some of the design choices they made in it to be a bit odd. It also deviates from the ISO standard, if that matters to you.

Dyalog is the only implementation that is robust and production ready that is still actively maintained. I would suggest learning with something other than the GNU implementation.

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Dyalog also deviates from the ISO standard, adding things from J like hooks and forks. IIRC, GNU APL's deviations are to bring it closer to IBM APL2, but it's been a while since I cared about any of this.

I am learning using the book "APL with a Mathematical Accent" and so far all the examples work fine (I am on chapter 3). I'll probably switch to learning J if I start running into problems. It says on the GNU page "implementation of ISO standard 13751" so if it's not standards compliant it should likely be filed as a bug.

I did request a copy of Dyalog but they rejected my application (probably because I didn't add my address?). I don't have a lot of enthusiasm for learning using a proprietary implementation of a language anyway.

I'm not sure where you are seeing that, on the GNU page I'm looking at[0] they are very clear that they are not following the complete standard.

"The APL interpreter is an (almost) complete implementation of ISO standard 13751 aka. Programming Language APL, Extended."

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/apl/

That reads to me like they are aiming for standard compliance but the implementation is still incomplete, which is quite different from deliberate deviation from the standard.

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