The APL c compiler project

This is a compiler, which essentially translates APL to C code. It is based on T. Budd's original work. Some liberties have been taken with the language. It is basically experimental, and not guaranteed to be good for anything. But I am maintaining it and would appreciate hearing about bugs or problems, or ports. I have been bringing the language closer to the standard (e.g. take and drop now behave as expected). I've just started adding complex support (v4), including the usual complex numbers, quaternions, and octonions (Cayley numbers, 1i2j). are , and octionions are not even associative.

complex numbers can be entered as 1i2 for the usual 1 + 2 i
Hamilton's quaternions include the complex numbers, plus two more square roots of -1, 1i2j3k4. Note that quaternions are not commutative. I've chosen an APL order (right to left), so
- 0i1*0j1 <-> 0k-1
- 0j1*0i1 <-> 0k1
Cayley's octionions include the quaternions, plus four more roots of -1, 1i2j3k4U5I6J7K8. They are not even associative.
- 0I1*0J1*0K1 <-> 0i0j0k0U-1I0J0K0
- (0I1*0J1)*0K1 <-> 0i0j0k0U1I0J0K0

I've been meaning to have a language with all the numbers for a while. Not sure about the transfinite ones yet... The source code is known to compile on FreeBSD, HP, Solaris, SunOS, Linux, Dec Alpha, SGI, Atari ST, DOS (using dj gcc; not tested in a while). Probably not difficult to port to any unix system. As of 3.30 I'm using autoconf, which should simplify building and porting. Currently this is split into a development version, which may have unstable features, and a more stable version.

Development Version. Added anonymous functions, functions as values. Allow system fns with user ops, and vice-versa. I've gotten tired of yacc/bison and have moved most of the parsing to hand written parser. Much easier, probably because APL isn't lalr or ... (maybe a packrat parser would be better?).
- aplc 6.12(.tar.gz) In Development (6/17/2008)
- aplc 6.11(.tar.gz) (10/10/2007)
Stable version (bug fixes):
- aplc 5.12(.tar.gz) (12/28/2007)
- aplc 4.10(.tar.gz) (10/27/2002)

APLc Language reference (TeX source included in distribution): aplc_doc.pdf (v6.12)

Tim Budd's original code (.tar.Z)

Comments? swsirlinAtEarthlinkDotNet

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