Glyph on Nostr: My father told me a story about APL being one of the first widely-available REPLs to ...
My father told me a story about APL being one of the first widely-available REPLs to exist. Since it was contemporary with teletypes, something like ">>>" would literally waste ink, so apparently the convention for the interactive prompt was six spaces, and "space over six" was slang for "interactively prompt the user for code to execute", which is a great bit of slang to have, and much better than "triple greater than" or whatever.
Published at
2024-07-06 23:49:48Event JSON
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"content": "My father told me a story about APL being one of the first widely-available REPLs to exist. Since it was contemporary with teletypes, something like \"\u003e\u003e\u003e\" would literally waste ink, so apparently the convention for the interactive prompt was six spaces, and \"space over six\" was slang for \"interactively prompt the user for code to execute\", which is a great bit of slang to have, and much better than \"triple greater than\" or whatever.",
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