"APL influenced the development of pipes"

What's ironic is the current "major" implementation of APL, Dyalog, doesn't optimize generation and processing of large vectors by treating them as streams. IOW, creating a sequence 1 to 1 million actually takes up 1 million * sizeof(double) bytes. It's sorely disappointing.

Which is odd, because that optimization has been known in the APL community for a long time. Edit: They probably have their reasons for not including it. I don't know anything about the Dyalog implementation internals.

See e.g. Abrams's "An APL Machine" (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacreports/slac-r-114.htm...) from 1970, where he describes them as 'drag-along' and 'beating'. Essentially, lazy evaluation, but done in bursts to take advantage of many of APL's other properties.

I'm currently working on adding this to Kona (http://github.com/kevinlawler/kona), part of a virtual-machine-based reworking of the implementation.

Good to know Dyalog isn't a representative implementation of APL.

Since the link on that page is broken, here's the full interview:

http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/mcilroy.htm

0ρ☐←"Really?"