Christopher James Huff <chr### [at] maccom> wrote in news:chrishuff-
0A9### [at] netplexaussieorg:

> In article <Xns### [at] 204213191226>,
>  Philippe Lhoste <Phi### [at] GMXnet> wrote:
> 
>> No, VB support of vectors is awful! Better use APL. The version which 
>> needs special fonts and little stickers on the keyboard...
> 
> Heh...I've heard that APL is an awful language. Any examples?

A Google search on APL language sample gave me a number of links, but no 
graphical example of what the original language was.
I have a book on the language, though I have not programmed it... It was 
fun, using a number of special symbols, some greek, some others produced, 
at the time, by surperposing two symbols on the CRT...
Not very readable, but fun and very terse...

It seems that modern compilers replaced these symbols by keywords...
See a page of codes to solve a "real" problem at 
<http://www.chilton.com/~jimw/ballclk.html> for example.

> I'm working on a little language (called "G" for the moment) which is 
> designed for 3D graphics (basically a shader language), I'm trying to 

What is exactly a shader language. I see this a lot with Renderman and 
compatibles, but I am not sure of what it is and how it is used... 
Something like procedural textures?

> make it do numeric stuff as fast as possible for an interpreted 
> language. It'll be nothing like Sapphire, it will be as static as 
> possible and won't be OO, but the syntax will probably be fairly 
> similar. I don't know any of the shading languages, but the interpreter 
> will hopefully be flexible enough to handle them if a compiler is 
> written.
> Some assembly knowledge would probably help a lot...stack machines are 
> easy, but I don't know how to write a compiler for a register based 
> machine.

Good luck (even if luck isn't the right word :-).

-- 
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Philippe Lhoste (Paris -- France)
Professional programmer and amateur artist
http://jove.prohosting.com/~philho/

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