APL and J

Originally developed as a theoretical language by Kenneth Iverson in his book "A Programming Language" (Wiley, 1962), APL was not actually implemented until the late 1960s by IBM. It has a reputation for being extremely cryptic but powerful, and is notorious for the power to write incomprehensible one-line programs which do amazing things (partly due to its use of a non-ASCII character set). J is a successor to APL, and is essentially a superset of APL (but one for which the ASCII character code is sufficient!). J can be used as a pure functional programming language like Lisp, ML or Haskell.

Development tools:

	APL Plus special edition A free APL interpreter for DOS.    ¤  May 1995. Freeware.
	I-APL An APL interpreter.    ¤  Apr 1989. Free for non-commercial use. Home site: http://www.simtel.net/simtel.net/msdos/misclang.html
	TryAPL2 A free APL implementation for DOS from IBM.    ¤  Sep 1992. Freeware. Home site: http://www.software.ibm.com/ad/apl/
	J 4.06 A free implementation of J for Windows from J Software.    ¤  May 2001. Freeware. Home site: http://www.jsoftware.com/

Tutorials and FAQs:

	The APL FAQ Questions and answers about APL from the newsgroup comp.lang.apl.    ¤  4 Jun 2001. Freely redistributable. Home site: http://www.faqs.org/faqs/apl-faq/
	Computers and Mathematical Notation A basic introduction to J by Kenneth Iverson.    ¤  1995. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://www.jsoftware.com/pubs/camn.html
	J for the APL Programmer    ¤  Jun 1996. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://www.jsoftware.com/pubs/j4apl.html
	The J FAQ Questions and answers about J.    ¤  6 Jun 1997. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://www.jsoftware.com/download/jfaq.txt (now gone; HTML markup by John English)
	Introduction to Programming Langauges A comparative study of programming languages, their development and the development of the programming paradigms that they embody.    ¤  3 Aug 2001. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://cs.wwc.edu/~aabyan/221_2/PLBOOK/
	The Functional Programming FAQ Questions and answers about functional programming in general.    ¤  1 Aug 2001. Reproduced by permission. Home site: http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/Department/Staff/gmh/faq.html

External resources:

	ACM SIGAPL The Association of Computing Machinery's special interest group on APL.
	APL and J archives An archive site hosted by the University of Waterloo in Ontario (also mirrored in Vienna).
	Vector The journal of the British APL Association (a specialist group of the BCS).
	APL information Information about APL maintained by Jim Weigang.
	J Software The official home of J.
	APL links at Yahoo These are also available at Yahoo UK.
	J links at Yahoo These are also available at Yahoo UK.
	The comp.lang.apl newsgroup A newsgroup for discussions of APL-related issues.
	The comp.functional newsgroup A good source of information about functional programming in general.