Samiksha Jaiswal (Editor)

A (programming language)

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Paradigm
  
array

Developer
  
Morgan Stanley

Stable release
  
4.20-2 / November 2006

Designed by
  
Arthur Whitney

First appeared
  
1988

Typing discipline
  
dynamic, strong

A+ is an array programming language descendent from the programming language A, which in turn was created to replace APL in 1988. Arthur Whitney developed the "A" portion of A+, while other developers at Morgan Stanley extended it, adding a graphical user interface and other language features. A+ was designed for numerically intensive applications, especially those found in financial applications. A+ runs on many Unix variants, including Linux. A+ is a high-level, interactive, interpreted language.

A+ provides an extended set of functions and operators, a graphical user interface with automatic synchronization of widgets and variables, asynchronous execution of functions associated with variables and events, dynamic loading of user compiled subroutines, and other features. A newer graphical user interface has not yet been ported to all supported platforms


The A+ language implements the following changes to the APL language:

  • an A+ function may have up to nine formal parameters
  • A+ code statements are separated by semicolons, so a single statement may be divided into two or more physical lines
  • The explicit result of a function or operator is the result of the last statement executed
  • A+ implements an object called a dependency, which is a global variable (the dependent variable) and an associated definition that is like a function with no arguments. Values can be explicitly set and referenced in exactly the same ways as for a global variable, but they can also be set through the associated definition.

    • Interactive A+ development is primarily done in the Xemacs editor, through extensions to the editor. Because A+ code uses the original APL symbols, displaying A+ requires a font with those special characters; a font called "kapl" is provided on the web site for that purpose.

    Arthur Whitney went on to create the K language, a proprietary array language. Like J, K omits the APL character set. It does not have some of the perceived complexities of A+, such as the existence of statements and two different modes of syntax.

    References

    A+ (programming language) Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA