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Comment by shrubble | Hacker News Reader

There's the fully open source GNU APL which compiles on Arm Linux in addition to Linux, OpenBSD, MacOS.

I don't know what is needed to get from Arm Linux to Android.

dzaima/APL (https://github.com/dzaima/apl) has an Android version. I would recommend that over GNU APL which makes a number of questionable language choices.

Many modern APLs—Dyalog APL, NARS2000, ngn/apl, and dzaima/APL—include support for forks. They're usually called function trains in APL.

Seeing as I am not an APL guru, I would appreciate your comments on the language choices that you don't agree with.

The one that should stand out to programmers in other languages is using dynamic scope instead of lexical scope for its anonymous functions, even though they were based on Dyalog's dfns which are lexically scoped. There are other more APL-centric issues such as even more questionable use of square brackets than the typical APL.

I work for Dyalog which is a "competitor" (in practice, the APL market share is small enough that any APL doing well helps us all). We have a lot of respect for other APL implementations and frequently use their choices as reference points for our own decisions. GNU is the only exception.

Thanks for the tip and for telling me about function trains.

Also great work on Dyalog, which I had a personal license to back when I experimented a couple of years ago. I can't recall what my problem with GNU APL was but I quickly found it too painful to try and learn with.

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