An Array and List Processing System

Abstract

We present ALPS, a personal interactive computational environment that combines the primitives and arrays of APL\360 with the syntax and semantics of early LISP. Selected features from APL\2, Scheme, Common Lisp and other extensions were incorporated over time. Both LISP and APL are among the oldest surviving programming languages. Although they were devised for different purposes they have a number of features in common. We show how using their common features as design principles, the mathematical power of APL and the flexibility of LISP are combined into a simple yet effective tool for diverse system engineering tasks. In this paper the creation, design and evolution of the system are described, illustrating some features with code samples. Following a brief discussion on some implementation details we provide performance data of a couple of sample applications on a variety of hardware.