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Acapulco | References | References |
Acapulco | Bibliography | Bibliography |
Acapulco | External links | External links
Category:1550 establishments in the Spanish Empire
Category:Populated coastal places in Mexico
Category:Beaches of Guerrero
Category:Populated places established in 1525
Category:Populated places in Guerrero
Category:Port cities and towns on the Mexican Pacific coast
Category:Seaside resorts in Mexico |
Acapulco | Table of Content | Short description, History, Pre-Columbian, 16th century, 17th–19th centuries, 20th century, 21st century, Hurricane Otis, Hurricane John, Geography, Climate, Government, Demographics, Population, Economy, Tourism, Problems, Cuisine, Attractions, Spring break, Transportation, International relations, Consulates, Twin towns and partner cities, International, Domestic, UNESCO World Heritage Site nominations, See also, References, Bibliography, External links |
August 16 | pp-pc1 | |
August 16 | Events | Events |
August 16 | Pre-1600 | Pre-1600
1 BC – Wang Mang consolidates his power in China and is declared marshal of state. Emperor Ai of Han, who died the previous day, had no heirs.
942 – Start of the four-day Battle of al-Mada'in, between the Hamdanids of Mosul and the Baridis of Basra over control of the Abbasid capital, Baghdad.
963 – Nikephoros II Phokas is crowned emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
1328 – The House of Gonzaga seizes power in the Duchy of Mantua, and will rule until 1708.
1513 – Battle of the Spurs (Battle of Guinegate): King Henry VIII of England and his Imperial allies defeat French Forces who are then forced to retreat.
1570 – The Principality of Transylvania is established after John II Zápolya renounces his claim as King of Hungary in the Treaty of Speyer.Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation, Viking, 2004, p. 443 |
August 16 | 1601–1900 | 1601–1900
1652 – Battle of Plymouth: Inconclusive naval action between the fleets of Michiel de Ruyter and George Ayscue in the First Anglo-Dutch War.
1777 – American Revolutionary War: The Americans led by General John Stark rout British and Brunswick troops under Friedrich Baum at the Battle of Bennington in Walloomsac, New York.
1780 – American Revolutionary War: Battle of Camden: The British defeat the Americans near Camden, South Carolina.
1792 – Maximilien de Robespierre presents the petition of the Commune of Paris to the Legislative Assembly, which demanded the formation of a revolutionary tribunal.
1793 – French Revolution: A levée en masse is decreed by the National Convention.
1812 – War of 1812: American General William Hull surrenders Fort Detroit without a fight to the British Army.
1819 – Peterloo Massacre: Seventeen people die and over 600 are injured in cavalry charges at a public meeting at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, England.
1841 – U.S. President John Tyler vetoes a bill which called for the re-establishment of the Second Bank of the United States. Enraged Whig Party members riot outside the White House in the most violent demonstration on White House grounds in U.S. history.
1844 – Governor-general of the Philippines Narciso Claveria, signs a decree to reform the country's calendar by skipping Tuesday, December 31, as a solution to anomalies that had existed since Ferdinand Magellan's arrival in 1521.
1858 – U.S. President James Buchanan inaugurates the new transatlantic telegraph cable by exchanging greetings with Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom. However, a weak signal forces a shutdown of the service in a few weeks.
1859 – The Grand Duchy of Tuscany formally deposes the exiled House of Lorraine.
1863 – The Dominican Restoration War begins when Gregorio Luperón raises the Dominican flag in Santo Domingo after Spain had recolonized the country.
1869 – Battle of Acosta Ñu: A Paraguayan battalion largely made up of children is massacred by the Brazilian Army during the Paraguayan War.Hooker, T.D., 2008, The Paraguayan War, Nottingham: Foundry Books, p. 104
1870 – Franco-Prussian War: The Battle of Mars-la-Tour is fought, resulting in a Prussian victory.
1876 – Richard Wagner's Siegfried, the penultimate opera in his Ring cycle, is premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
1891 – The Basilica of San Sebastian, Manila, the first all-steel church in Asia, is officially inaugurated and blessed.
1896 – Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack and Dawson Charlie discover gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, setting off the Klondike Gold Rush.
1900 – The Battle of Elands River during the Second Boer War ends after a 13-day siege is lifted by the British. The battle had begun when a force of between 2,000 and 3,000 Boers had surrounded a force of 500 Australians, Rhodesians, Canadians and British soldiers at a supply dump at Brakfontein Drift. |
August 16 | 1901–present | 1901–present
1906 – The 8.2 Valparaíso earthquake hits central Chile, killing 3,882 people.
1913 – Tōhoku Imperial University of Japan (modern day Tohoku University) becomes the first university in Japan to admit female students.
1913 – Completion of the Royal Navy battlecruiser .
1916 – The Migratory Bird Treaty between Canada and the United States is signed.
1918 – The Battle of Lake Baikal was fought between the Czechoslovak Legion and the Red Army.
1920 – Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees. Next day, Chapman will become the second player to die from injuries sustained in a Major League Baseball game.
1920 – The congress of the Communist Party of Bukhara opens. The congress would call for armed revolution.
1920 – Polish–Soviet War: The Battle of Radzymin concludes; the Soviet Red Army is forced to turn away from Warsaw.
1923 – The United Kingdom gives the name "Ross Dependency" to part of its claimed Antarctic territory and makes the Governor-General of the Dominion of New Zealand its administrator.
1927 – The Dole Air Race begins from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, during which six out of the eight participating planes crash or disappear.
1929 – The 1929 Palestine riots break out in Mandatory Palestine between Palestinian Arabs and Jews and continue until the end of the month. In total, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs are killed.
1930 – The first color sound cartoon, Fiddlesticks, is released by Ub Iwerks.
1930 – The first British Empire Games are opened in Hamilton, Ontario, by the Governor General of Canada, the Viscount Willingdon.
1933 – Christie Pits riot takes place in Toronto, Ontario.Cyril H. Levitt and William Shaffir, The Riot at Christie Pits, Toronto: Lester & Orpen Denys, 1987
1942 – World War II: US Navy L-class blimp L-8 drifts in from the Pacific and eventually crashes in Daly City, California. The two-man crew cannot be found.
1943 – World War II: 317 Greek civilians are murdered by soldiers of the German 1st Mountain Division in the village of Kommeno, Greece.
1944 – First flight of a jet with forward-swept wings, the Junkers Ju 287.
1945 – The National Representatives' Congress, the precursor of the current National Assembly of Vietnam, convenes in Sơn Dương.
1946 – Mass riots in Kolkata begin; more than 4,000 people would be killed in 72 hours.
1946 – The All Hyderabad Trade Union Congress is founded in Secunderabad.
1954 – The first issue of Sports Illustrated is published.
1960 – Cyprus gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
1960 – Joseph Kittinger parachutes from a balloon over New Mexico, United States, at , setting three records that held until 2012: High-altitude jump, free fall, and highest speed by a human without an aircraft.
1964 – Vietnam War: A coup d'état replaces Dương Văn Minh with General Nguyễn Khánh as President of South Vietnam. A new constitution is established with aid from the U.S. Embassy.
1966 – Vietnam War: The House Un-American Activities Committee begins investigations of Americans who have aided the Viet Cong. The committee intends to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupt the meeting and 50 people are arrested.
1972 – In an unsuccessful coup d'état attempt, the Royal Moroccan Air Force fires upon Hassan II of Morocco's plane while he is traveling back to Rabat.
1975 – Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam symbolically hands over land to the Gurindji people after the eight-year Wave Hill walk-off, a landmark event in the history of Indigenous land rights in Australia, commemorated in a 1991 song by Paul Kelly and an annual celebration.
1987 – Northwest Airlines Flight 255, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes after takeoff in Detroit, Michigan, killing 154 of the 155 on board, plus two people on the ground.
1989 – A solar particle event affects computers at the Toronto Stock Exchange, forcing a halt to trading.
1991 – Indian Airlines Flight 257, a Boeing 737-200, crashes during approach to Imphal Airport, killing all 69 people on board.
2005 – West Caribbean Airways Flight 708, a McDonnell Douglas MD-82, crashes in Machiques, Venezuela, killing all 160 people on board.
2008 – The Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago is topped off at , at the time becoming the world's highest residence above ground-level.
2010 – AIRES Flight 8250 crashes at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport in San Andrés, San Andrés y Providencia, Colombia, killing two people.
2012 – South African police fatally shoot 34 miners and wound 78 more during an industrial dispute at Marikana near Rustenburg.
2013 – The ferry St. Thomas Aquinas collides with a cargo ship and sinks at Cebu, Philippines, killing 61 people with 59 others missing.
2015 – More than 96 people are killed and hundreds injured following a series of air-raids by the Syrian Arab Air Force on the rebel-held market town of Douma.
2015 – Trigana Air Flight 267, an ATR 42, crashes in Oksibl, Bintang Mountains Regency, killing all 54 people on board.
2020 – The August Complex fire in California burns more than one million acres of land. |
August 16 | Births | Births |
August 16 | Pre-1600 | Pre-1600
1355 – Philippa, 5th Countess of Ulster (d. 1382)
1378 – Hongxi Emperor of China (d. 1425)
1401 – Jacqueline, Countess of Hainaut (d. 1436)
1557 – Agostino Carracci, Italian painter and etcher (d. 1602)
1565 – Christina, Grand Duchess of Tuscany (d. 1637)
1573 – Anne of Austria, Queen of Poland (d. 1598) |
August 16 | 1601–1900 | 1601–1900
1637 – Countess Emilie Juliane of Barby-Mühlingen (d. 1706)
1645 – Jean de La Bruyère, French philosopher and author (d. 1696)
1650 – Vincenzo Coronelli, Italian monk, cosmographer, and cartographer (d. 1718)
1682 – Louis, Duke of Burgundy (d. 1712)
1744 – Pierre Méchain, French astronomer and surveyor (d. 1804)
1761 – Yevstigney Fomin, Russian pianist and composer (d. 1800)
1815 – John Bosco, Italian priest and educator (d. 1888)
1816 – Octavia Taylor, daughter of Zachary Taylor (d. 1820)
1816 – Sara Prinsep, British salon organiser (d. 1959)
1820 – Andrew Rainsford Wetmore, Canadian lawyer and politician, 1st Premier of New Brunswick (d. 1892)
1821 – Arthur Cayley, English mathematician and academic (d. 1895)
1824 – John Chisum, American cattle baron (d. 1884)https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/chisum-john-simpson
1831 – John Jones Ross, Canadian lawyer and politician, 7th Premier of Quebec (d. 1901)
1832 – Wilhelm Wundt, German physician, psychologist, and physiologist (d. 1920)
1842 – Jakob Rosanes, Ukrainian-German mathematician, chess player, and academic (d. 1922)
1845 – Gabriel Lippmann, Luxembourger-French physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1921)
1848 – Vladimir Sukhomlinov, Russian general (d. 1926)
1855 – James McGowen, Australian politician, 18th Premier of New South Wales (d. 1922)
1856 – Aparicio Saravia, Uruguayan general and politician (d. 1904)
1858 – Arthur Achleitner, German author (d. 1927)
1860 – Martin Hawke, 7th Baron Hawke, English-Scottish cricketer (d. 1938)
1860 – Jules Laforgue, Uruguayan-French poet and author (d. 1887)
1862 – Amos Alonzo Stagg, American baseball player and coach (d. 1965)
1864 – Elsie Inglis, Scottish surgeon and suffragette (d. 1917)
1865 – Mary Gilmore, Australian socialist, poet and journalist (d. 1962)
1868 – Bernarr Macfadden, American bodybuilder and publisher, founded Macfadden Publications (d. 1955)
1876 – Ivan Bilibin, Russian illustrator and stage designer (d. 1942)
1877 – Roque Ruaño, Spanish priest and engineer (d. 1935)
1882 – Désiré Mérchez, French swimmer and water polo player (d. 1968)
1884 – Hugo Gernsback, Luxembourger-American author and publisher (d. 1967)
1888 – T. E. Lawrence, British colonel, diplomat, writer and archaeologist (d. 1935)
1888 – Armand J. Piron, American violinist, composer, and bandleader (d. 1943)
1892 – Hal Foster, Canadian-American author and illustrator (d. 1982)
1892 – Otto Messmer, American cartoonist and animator, co-created Felix the Cat (d. 1983)
1894 – George Meany, American plumber and labor leader (d. 1980)
1895 – Albert Cohen, Greek-Swiss author and playwright (d. 1981)
1895 – Liane Haid, Austrian-Swiss actress and singer (d. 2000)
1895 – Arthur Rose Eldred, First Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America (d. 1951)
1900 – Ida Browne, Australian geologist and palaeontologist (d. 1976) |
August 16 | 1901–present | 1901–present
1902 – Georgette Heyer, English author (d. 1974)
1902 – Wallace Thurman, American author and playwright (d. 1934)
1904 – Minoru Genda, Japanese general, pilot, and politician (d. 1989)
1904 – Wendell Meredith Stanley, American biochemist and virologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1971)
1908 – Orlando Cole, American cellist and educator (d. 2010)
1908 – William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., American editor, novelist, short story writer, and essayist (d. 2000)
1909 – Paul Callaway, American organist and conductor (d. 1995)
1910 – Gloria Blondell, American actress (d. 1986)
1910 – Mae Clarke, American actress (d. 1992)
1911 – E. F. Schumacher, German economist and statistician (d. 1977)
1912 – Ted Drake, English footballer and manager (d. 1995)
1913 – Menachem Begin, Belarusian-Israeli politician, Prime Minister of Israel, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1992)
1915 – Al Hibbler, American baritone singer (d. 2001)
1916 – Iggy Katona, American race car driver (d. 2003)
1917 – Matt Christopher, American author (d. 1997)
1917 – Roque Cordero, Panamanian composer and educator (d. 2008)
1919 – Karl-Heinz Euling, German captain (d. 2014)
1920 – Charles Bukowski, German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer (d. 1994)
1922 – James Casey, English comedian, radio scriptwriter and producer (d. 2011)
1922 – Ernie Freeman, American pianist and bandleader (d. 2001)
1923 – Millôr Fernandes, Brazilian journalist and playwright (d. 2012)
1924 – Fess Parker, American actor (d. 2010)
1924 – Inez Voyce, American baseball player (d. 2022)
1925 – Willie Jones, American baseball player (d. 1983)
1925 – Mal Waldron, American pianist and composer (d. 2002)
1927 – Lois Nettleton, American actress (d. 2008)
1928 – Ann Blyth, American actress and singer
1928 – Eydie Gormé, American singer (d. 2013)
1928 – Ara Güler, Turkish photographer and journalist (d. 2018)
1928 – Eddie Kirkland, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2011)
1928 – Wyatt Tee Walker, American pastor, theologian, and activist (d. 2018)
1929 – Bill Evans, American pianist and composer (d. 1980)
1929 – Helmut Rahn, German footballer (d. 2003)
1929 – Fritz Von Erich, American wrestler and trainer (d. 1997)
1930 – Robert Culp, American actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2010)
1930 – Frank Gifford, American football player, sportscaster, and actor (d. 2015)
1930 – Leslie Manigat, Haitian educator and politician, 43rd President of Haiti (d. 2014)
1930 – Flor Silvestre, Mexican singer and actress (d. 2020)
1933 – Reiner Kunze, German poet and translator
1933 – Tom Maschler, English author and publisher (d. 2020)
1933 – Julie Newmar, American actress
1933 – Stuart Roosa, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1994)
1934 – Angela Buxton, British tennis player (d. 2020)
1934 – Diana Wynne Jones, English author (d. 2011)
1934 – Douglas Kirkland, Canadian-American photographer (d. 2022)
1934 – Ketty Lester, American singer and actress
1934 – Pierre Richard, French actor, director, and screenwriter
1934 – John Standing, English actor
1934 – Sam Trimble, Australian cricketer (d. 2019)
1935 – Cliff Fletcher, Canadian businessman
1935 – Andreas Stamatiadis, Greek footballer and coach
1936 – Anita Gillette, American actress and singer
1936 – Alan Hodgkinson, English footballer and coach (d. 2015)
1937 – David Anderson, Canadian journalist, lawyer, and politician
1937 – David Behrman, American composer and producer
1937 – Ian Deans, Canadian politician (d. 2016)
1937 – Boris Rõtov, Estonian chess player (d. 1987)
1939 – Seán Brady, Irish cardinal
1939 – Trevor McDonald, Trinidadian-English journalist and academic
1939 – Billy Joe Shaver, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2020)
1939 – Eric Weissberg, American singer, banjo player, and multi-instrumentalist (d. 2020)
1940 – Bruce Beresford, Australian director and producer
1942 – Lesley Turner Bowrey, Australian tennis player
1942 – Barbara George, American R&B singer-songwriter (d. 2006)
1942 – Robert Squirrel Lester, American soul singer (d. 2010)
1943 – Woody Peoples, American football player (d. 2010)
1944 – Kevin Ayers, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2013)
1945 – Bob Balaban, American actor, director, and producer
1945 – Russell Brookes, English race car driver (d. 2019)
1945 – Suzanne Farrell, American ballerina and educator
1945 – Gary Loizzo, American guitarist, singer, recording engineer, and record producer (d. 2016)
1945 – Nigel Terry, British stage and film actor (d. 2015)
1946 – Masoud Barzani, Iranian-Kurdish politician, President of Iraqi Kurdistan
1946 – Lesley Ann Warren, American actress
1947 – Carol Moseley Braun, American lawyer and politician, United States Ambassador to New Zealand
1947 – Katharine Hamnett, English fashion designer
1948 – Earl Blumenauer, American politician, U.S. Representative from Oregon
1948 – Barry Hay, Indian-born Dutch rock musician
1948 – Mike Jorgensen, American baseball player and manager
1948 – Pierre Reid, Canadian educator and politician (d. 2021)
1948 – Joey Spampinato, American singer-songwriter and bass player
1949 – Scott Asheton, American drummer (d. 2014)
1949 – Paul Pasqualoni, American football player and coach
1949 – Bill Spooner, American guitarist and songwriter
1950 – Hasely Crawford, Trinidadian runner
1950 – Marshall Manesh, Iranian-American actor
1950 – Jeff Thomson, Australian cricketer
1951 – Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, Nigerian businessman and politician, 13th President of Nigeria (d. 2010)
1952 – Reginald VelJohnson, American actor
1953 – Kathie Lee Gifford, American talk show host, singer, and actress
1953 – James "J.T." Taylor, American R&B singer-songwriter
1954 – James Cameron, Canadian director, producer, and screenwriter
1954 – George Galloway, Scottish-English politician and broadcaster
1955 – Jeff Perry, American actor
1955 – James Reilly, Irish surgeon and politician, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs
1956 – Vahan Hovhannisyan, Armenian soldier and politician (d. 2014)
1957 – Laura Innes, American actress and director
1957 – R. R. Patil, Indian lawyer and politician, Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 2015)
1958 – Madonna, American singer-songwriter, producer, actress, and director
1958 – Angela Bassett, American actress
1958 – Anne L'Huillier, French physicist
1958 – José Luis Clerc, Argentinian tennis player and coach
1959 – Marc Sergeant, Belgian cyclist and manager
1960 – Rosita Baltazar, Belizean choreographer, dancer, and dance instructor (d. 2015)
1960 – Timothy Hutton, American actor, producer and director
1960 – Franz Welser-Möst, Austrian-American conductor and director
1961 – Christian Okoye, American football player
1962 – Steve Carell, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter
1963 – Aloísio Pires Alves, Brazilian footballer and manager
1963 – Christine Cavanaugh, American voice artist (d. 2014)
1964 – Jimmy Arias, American tennis player and sportscaster
1966 – Eddie Olczyk, American ice hockey player, coach, and commentator
1967 – Mark Coyne, Australian rugby league player
1967 – Ulrika Jonsson, Swedish journalist, actress, and author
1968 – Arvind Kejriwal, Indian civil servant and politician, 7th Chief Minister of Delhi
1968 – Andy Milder, American actor
1968 – Mateja Svet, Slovenian skier
1968 – Wolfgang Tillmans, German photographer
1970 – Bonnie Bernstein, American journalist and sportscaster
1970 – Manisha Koirala, Nepalese actress in Indian films
1970 – Seth Peterson, American actor
1971 – Stefan Klos, German footballer
1972 – Stan Lazaridis, Australian footballer
1972 – Emily Strayer, American singer and musician
1974 – Shivnarine Chanderpaul, Guyanese cricketer
1974 – Didier Cuche, Swiss skier
1974 – Krisztina Egerszegi, Hungarian swimmer
1974 – Iván Hurtado, Ecuadorian footballer and politician
1974 – Ryan Longwell, American football player
1975 – Didier Agathe, French footballer
1975 – Jonatan Johansson, Finnish footballer, coach, and manager
1975 – George Stults, American actor
1975 – Taika Waititi, New Zealand director, screenwriter and actor
1979 – Paul Gallacher, Scottish footballer
1979 – Ian Moran, Australian cricketer
1980 – Vanessa Carlton, American singer-songwriter
1980 – Bob Hardy, English bass player
1980 – Emerson Ramos Borges, Brazilian footballer
1980 – Piet Rooijakkers, Dutch cyclist
1981 – Roque Santa Cruz, Paraguayan footballer
1982 – Cam Gigandet, American actor
1982 – Joleon Lescott, English footballer
1983 – Nikolaos Zisis, Greek basketball player
1984 – Matteo Anesi, Italian speed skater
1984 – Candice Dupree, American basketball player
1984 – Konstantin Vassiljev, Estonian footballer
1985 – Cristin Milioti, American actress
1986 – Yu Darvish, Japanese baseball player
1986 – Martín Maldonado, Puerto Rican baseball player
1986 – Shawn Pyfrom, American actor
1987 – Carey Price, Canadian ice hockey player
1987 – Eri Kitamura, Japanese voice actress and singer.
1988 – Ismaïl Aissati, Moroccan footballer
1988 – Ryan Kerrigan, American football player
1988 – Rumer Willis, American actress
1989 – Cedric Alexander, American wrestler
1989 – Wang Hao, Chinese race walker
1989 – Moussa Sissoko, French footballer
1990 – Godfrey Oboabona, Nigerian footballer
1991 – José Eduardo de Araújo, Brazilian footballer
1991 – Evanna Lynch, Irish actress
1991 – Young Thug, American rapper, singer and songwriter
1992 – Diego Schwartzman, Argentinian tennis player
1993 – Cameron Monaghan, American actor and model
1996 – Caeleb Dressel, American swimmer
1997 – Greyson Chance, American musician
1999 – Karen Chen, American figure skater
2001 – Jannik Sinner, Italian tennis player |
August 16 | Deaths | Deaths |
August 16 | Pre-1600 | Pre-1600
AD 79 – Empress Ma, Chinese Han dynasty consort (b. 40)
856 – Theutbald I, bishop of Langres
963 – Marianos Argyros, Byzantine general (b. 944)
1027 – George I of Georgia (b. 998)
1153 – Bernard de Tremelay, fourth Grand Master of the Knights Templar
1225 – Hōjō Masako, Japanese regent and onna-bugeisha (b. 1156)
1258 – Theodore II Laskaris, Byzantine-Greek emperor (b. 1222)
1285 – Philip I, Count of Savoy (b. 1207)
1297 – John II of Trebizond (b. 1262)
1327 – Roch, French saint (b. 1295)
1339 – Azzone Visconti, founder of the state of Milan (b. 1302)
1358 – Albert II, Duke of Austria (b. 1298)
1419 – Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia (b. 1361)
1443 – Ashikaga Yoshikatsu, Japanese shōgun (b. 1434)
1492 – Beatrice of Silva, Dominican nun
1518 – Loyset Compère, French composer (b. 1445)
1532 – John, Elector of Saxony (b. 1468) |
August 16 | 1601–1900 | 1601–1900
1661 – Thomas Fuller, English historian and author (b. 1608)
1678 – Andrew Marvell, English poet and author (b. 1621)
1705 – Jacob Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and theorist (b. 1654)
1733 – Matthew Tindal, English philosopher and author (b. 1657)
1791 – Charles-François de Broglie, marquis de Ruffec, French soldier and diplomat (b. 1719)
1836 – Marc-Antoine Parseval, French mathematician and theorist (b. 1755)
1855 – Henry Colburn, English publisher (b. 1785)
1861 – Ranavalona I, Queen consort of Kingdom of Madagascar and then sovereign (b. 1778)
1878 – Richard Upjohn, English-American architect (b. 1802)
1886 – Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Indian mystic and philosopher (b. 1836)
1887 – Webster Paulson, English civil engineer (b. 1837)
1888 – John Pemberton, American pharmacist and chemist, invented Coca-Cola (b. 1831)
1893 – Jean-Martin Charcot, French neurologist and academic (b. 1825)
1899 – Robert Bunsen, German chemist and academic (b. 1811)
1900 – José Maria de Eça de Queirós, Portuguese journalist and author (b. 1845) |
August 16 | 1901–present | 1901–present
1904 – Prentiss Ingraham, American soldier and author (b. 1843)
1911 – Patrick Francis Moran, Irish-Australian cardinal (b. 1830)
1914 – Carl Theodor Schulz, German-Norwegian gardener (b. 1835)
1916 – George Scott, English footballer (b. 1885)
1920 – Henry Daglish, Australian politician, Premier of Western Australia (b. 1866)
1921 – Peter I of Serbia (b. 1844)
1938 – Andrej Hlinka, Slovak priest, journalist, and politician (b. 1864)
1938 – Robert Johnson, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1911)
1945 – Takijirō Ōnishi, Japanese admiral (b. 1891)
1948 – Babe Ruth, American baseball player and coach (b. 1895)
1949 – Margaret Mitchell, American journalist and author (b. 1900)
1952 – Lydia Field Emmet, American painter and academic (b. 1866)
1956 – Bela Lugosi, Hungarian-American actor (b. 1882)
1957 – Irving Langmuir, American chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1881)
1958 – Jacob M. Lomakin, Soviet Consul General in New York City, journalist and economist (b. 1904)
1959 – William Halsey, Jr., American admiral (b. 1882)
1959 – Wanda Landowska, Polish-French harpsichord player (b. 1879)
1961 – Abdul Haq, Pakistani linguist and scholar (b. 1870)
1963 – Joan Eardley, British artist (b. 1921)
1971 – Spyros Skouras, Greek-American businessman (b. 1893)
1972 – Pierre Brasseur, French actor and screenwriter (b. 1905)
1973 – Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-American biochemist and microbiologist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1888)
1977 – Elvis Presley, American singer and actor (b. 1935)
1978 – Alidius Tjarda van Starkenborgh Stachouwer, Dutch soldier and politician, Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies (b. 1888)
1979 – John Diefenbaker, Canadian lawyer and politician, 13th Prime Minister of Canada (b. 1895)
1983 – Earl Averill, American baseball player (b. 1902)
1984 – Duško Radović, Serbian children's writer, poet, journalist, aphorist and TV editor (b. 1922)
1986 – Ronnie Aird, English cricketer and administrator (b. 1902)
1986 – Jaime Sáenz, Bolivian author and poet (b. 1921)
1989 – Amanda Blake, American actress (b. 1929)
1990 – Pat O'Connor, New Zealand wrestler and trainer (b. 1925)
1991 – Luigi Zampa, Italian director and screenwriter (b. 1905)
1992 – Mark Heard, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1951)
1993 – Stewart Granger, English-American actor (b. 1913)
1997 – Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pakistani musician and Qawwali singer (b. 1948)
1997 – Sultan Ahmad Nanupuri, Bangladeshi Islamic scholar and teacher (b. 1914)
1998 – Phil Leeds, American actor (b. 1916)
1998 – Dorothy West, American journalist and author (b. 1907)
2002 – Abu Nidal, Palestinian terrorist leader (b. 1937)
2002 – Jeff Corey, American actor (b. 1914)
2002 – John Roseboro, American baseball player and coach (b. 1933)
2003 – Idi Amin, Ugandan field marshal and politician, 3rd President of Uganda (b. 1928)
2004 – Ivan Hlinka, Czech ice hockey player and coach (b. 1950)
2004 – Balanadarajah Iyer, Sri Lankan journalist and poet (b. 1957)
2004 – Carl Mydans, American photographer and journalist (b. 1907)
2004 – Robert Quiroga, American boxer (b. 1969)
2005 – Vassar Clements, American fiddler (b. 1928)
2005 – Tonino Delli Colli, Italian cinematographer (b. 1922)
2005 – William Corlett, English novelist and playwright (b. 1938)
2005 – Frère Roger, Swiss monk and mystic (b. 1915)
2006 – Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguayan general and dictator; 46th President of Paraguay (b. 1912)
2007 – Bahaedin Adab, Iranian engineer and politician (b. 1945)
2008 – Dorival Caymmi, Brazilian singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1914)
2008 – Ronnie Drew, Irish musician, folk singer and actor (b. 1934)
2008 – Masanobu Fukuoka, Japanese farmer and author (b. 1913)
2010 – Dimitrios Ioannidis, Greek general (b. 1923)
2011 – Mihri Belli, Turkish activist and politician (b. 1916)
2012 – Princess Lalla Amina of Morocco (b. 1954)
2012 – Martine Franck, Belgian photographer and director (b. 1938)
2012 – Abune Paulos, Ethiopian patriarch (b. 1935)
2012 – William Windom, American actor (b. 1923)
2013 – David Rees, Welsh mathematician and academic (b. 1918)
2014 – Patrick Aziza, Nigerian general and politician, Governor of Kebbi State (b. 1947)
2014 – Vsevolod Nestayko, Ukrainian author (b. 1930)
2014 – Mario Oriani-Ambrosini, Italian-South African lawyer and politician (b. 1960)
2014 – Peter Scholl-Latour, German journalist, author, and academic (b. 1924)
2015 – Jacob Bekenstein, Mexican-American physicist, astronomer, and academic (b. 1947)
2015 – Anna Kashfi, British actress (b. 1934)
2015 – Shuja Khanzada, Pakistani colonel and politician (b. 1943)
2015 – Mile Mrkšić, Serb general (b. 1947)
2016 – João Havelange, Brazilian water polo player, lawyer, and businessman (b. 1916)
2016 – John McLaughlin, American television personality (b. 1927)
2018 – Aretha Franklin, American singer-songwriter (b. 1942)
2018 – Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Indian poet and 12th Prime Minister of India (b. 1924)
2018 – Wakako Yamauchi, American-Japanese writer (b. 1924)
2019 – Peter Fonda, American actor, director, and screenwriter. (b. 1940)
2019 – Richard Williams, Canadian-British animator (b. 1933)
2021 – Sean Lock, English comedian and actor (b. 1963)
2023 – Howard S. Becker, American sociologist (b. 1928) |
August 16 | Holidays and observances | Holidays and observances
Bennington Battle Day (Vermont, United States)
Children's Day (Paraguay)
Christian feast day:
Ana Petra Pérez Florido
Armel (Armagillus)
Diomedes of Tarsus
Roch
Stephen I of Hungary
Translation of the Acheiropoietos icon from Edessa to Constantinople. (Eastern Orthodox Church)
August 16 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
Gozan no Okuribi (Kyoto, Japan)
National Airborne Day (United States)
Restoration Day (Dominican Republic)
The first day of the Independence Days, celebrates the independence of Gabon from France in 1960.
Xicolatada (Palau-de-Cerdagne, France) |
August 16 | References | References |
August 16 | External links | External links
Category:Days of August |
August 16 | Table of Content | pp-pc1, Events, Pre-1600, 1601–1900, 1901–present, Births, Pre-1600, 1601–1900, 1901–present, Deaths, Pre-1600, 1601–1900, 1901–present, Holidays and observances, References, External links |
Alan Kay | Short description | Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist who pioneered work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented."
He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing Award in 2003. |
Alan Kay | Early life and work | Early life and work
In an interview on education in America with the Davis Group Ltd., Kay said:
Originally from Springfield, Massachusetts, Kay's family relocated several times due to his father's career in physiology before ultimately settling in the New York metropolitan area.
He attended Brooklyn Technical High School. Having accumulated enough credits to graduate, he then attended Bethany College in Bethany, West Virginia, where he majored in biology and minored in mathematics.
Kay then taught guitar in Denver, Colorado for a year. He was drafted in the United States Army, then qualified for officer training in the United States Air Force, where he became a computer programmer after passing an aptitude test.
After his discharge, he enrolled at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in mathematics and molecular biology in 1966.
In the autumn of 1966, he began graduate school at the University of Utah College of Engineering. He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1968, then a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1969. His doctoral dissertation, FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language, described the invention of a computer language named FLEX. While there, he worked with "fathers of computer graphics" David C. Evans (who had recently been recruited from the University of California, Berkeley to start Utah's computer science department) and Ivan Sutherland (best known for writing such pioneering programs as Sketchpad). Kay credits Sutherland's 1963 thesis for influencing his views on objects and computer programming. As he grew busier with research for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he ended his musical career.
In 1968, he met Seymour Papert and learned of the programming language Logo, a dialect of Lisp optimized for educational purposes. This led him to learn of the work of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and of constructionist learning, further influencing his professional orientation. On December 9 of that same year he was present in San Francisco for the Mother of all Demos, a landmark computer demonstration by Douglas Engelbart. Even though he was sick with a high fever on that day, the event was very influential in Kay's career. He recalled later: "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life".
In 1969, Kay became a visiting researcher at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in anticipation of accepting a professorship at Carnegie Mellon University. Instead, in 1970, he joined the Xerox PARC research staff in Palo Alto, California. Through the decade, he developed prototypes of networked workstations using the programming language Smalltalk.
Along with some colleagues at PARC, Kay is one of the fathers of the idea of object-oriented programming (OOP), which he named. Some original object-oriented concepts, including the use of the words 'object' and 'class', had been developed for Simula 67 at the Norwegian Computing Center. Kay said:
I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging".
While at PARC, Kay conceived the Dynabook concept, a key progenitor of laptop and tablet computers and the e-book. He is also the architect of the modern overlapping windowing graphical user interface (GUI). Because the Dynabook was conceived as an educational platform, he is considered one of the first researchers into mobile learning; many features of the Dynabook concept have been adopted in the design of the One Laptop Per Child educational platform, with which Kay is actively involved. |
Alan Kay | Subsequent work | Subsequent work
From 1981 to 1984, Kay was Chief Scientist at Atari. In 1984, he became an Apple Fellow. After the closure of the Apple Advanced Technology Group in 1997, he was recruited by his friend Bran Ferren, head of research and development at Disney, to join Walt Disney Imagineering as a Disney Fellow. He remained there until Ferren left to start Applied Minds Inc with Imagineer Danny Hillis, leading to the cessation of the Fellows program.
In 2001, Kay founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a nonprofit organization dedicated to children, learning, and advanced software development. For their first ten years, Kay and his Viewpoints group were based at Applied Minds in Glendale, California, where he and Ferren worked on various projects. Kay served as president of the Institute until its closure in 2018.
In 2002 Kay joined HP Labs as a senior fellow, departing when HP disbanded the Advanced Software Research Team on July 20, 2005.
He has been an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Kay served on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. |
Alan Kay | Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet | Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet
In December 1995, while still at Apple, Kay collaborated with many others to start the open source Squeak version of Smalltalk. As part of this effort, in November 1996, his team began research on what became the Etoys system. More recently he started, with David A. Smith, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, Rick McGeer, Julian Lombardi, and Mark McCahill, the Croquet Project, an open-source networked 2D and 3D environment for collaborative work. |
Alan Kay | Tweak | Tweak
In 2001, it became clear that the Etoy architecture in Squeak had reached its limits in what the Morphic interface infrastructure could do. Andreas Raab, a researcher in Kay's group then at Hewlett-Packard, proposed defining a "script process" and providing a default scheduling mechanism that avoided several more general problems. The result was a new user interface, proposed to replace the Squeak Morphic user interface. Tweak added mechanisms of islands, asynchronous messaging, players and costumes, language extensions, projects, and tile scripting. Its underlying object system is class-based, but to users (during programming) it acts as if it were prototype-based. Tweak objects are created and run in Tweak project windows. |
Alan Kay | The Children's Machine | The Children's Machine
In November 2005, at the World Summit on the Information Society, the MIT research laboratories unveiled a new laptop computer for educational use around the world. It has many names, including the $100 Laptop, the One Laptop per Child program, the Children's Machine, and the XO-1. The program was founded and is sustained by Kay's friend Nicholas Negroponte, and is based on Kay's Dynabook ideal. Kay is a prominent co-developer of the computer, focusing on its educational software using Squeak and Etoys. |
Alan Kay | Reinventing programming | Reinventing programming
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with Sketchpad, Simula, Smalltalk, and the bloated code of commercial software.
On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium". Proposal to NSF – Granted on August 31, 2006 STEPS is a recursive acronym that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"
thumb|right|Computer scientist Alan Kay |
Alan Kay | Personal life | Personal life
Kay is a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer.
He also is an amateur classical pipe organist. |
Alan Kay | Awards and honors | Awards and honors
Kay has received many awards and honors, including:
UdK 01-Award in Berlin, Germany for pioneering the GUI; J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique; NEC C&C Prize (2001)
Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in Telluride, Colorado (2002)
ACM Turing Award "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing" (2003)
Kyoto Prize; Charles Stark Draper Prize with Butler W. Lampson, Robert W. Taylor and Charles P. Thacker (2004)
UPE Abacus Award, for individuals who have provided extensive support and leadership for student-related activities in the computing and information disciplines (2012)
Honorary doctorates:
– Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stockholm (2002)
– Georgia Institute of Technology (2005)
– Columbia College Chicago awarded Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa (2005)
– Laurea Honoris Causa in Informatica, Università di Pisa, Italy (2007)
– University of Waterloo (2008)
– Kyoto University (2009)
– Universidad de Murcia (2010)
– University of Edinburgh (2017)
Honorary Professor, Berlin University of the Arts
Elected fellow of:
– American Academy of Arts and Sciences
– National Academy of Engineering for inventing the concept of portable personal computing. (1997)
– Royal Society of Arts
– Computer History Museum "for his fundamental contributions to personal computing and human-computer interface development." (1999)
– Association for Computing Machinery "For fundamental contributions to personal computing and object-oriented programming." (2008)
– Hasso Plattner Institute (2011)
His other honors include the J-D Warnier Prix d'Informatique, the ACM Systems Software Award, the NEC Computers & Communication Foundation Prize, the Funai Foundation Prize, the Lewis Branscomb Technology Award, and the ACM SIGCSE Award for Outstanding Contributions to Computer Science Education. |
Alan Kay | See also | See also
List of pioneers in computer science |
Alan Kay | References | References |
Alan Kay | External links | External links
Viewpoints Research Institute
"There is no information content in Alan Kay" 2012
Programming a problem-oriented language, an unpublished book, by Charles H. Moore, June 1970
Category:1940 births
Category:American computer programmers
Category:American computer scientists
Category:Apple Inc. employees
Category:Apple Fellows
Category:Atari people
Category:American computer science educators
Category:Draper Prize winners
Category:Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Category:2008 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Category:Hewlett-Packard people
Category:Human–computer interaction researchers
Category:Living people
Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Category:Open source advocates
Category:Scientists from Springfield, Massachusetts
Category:Programming language designers
Category:Scientists at PARC (company)
Category:Turing Award laureates
Category:University of California, Los Angeles faculty
Category:University of Colorado Boulder alumni
Category:University of Utah alumni
Category:Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology
Category:Academic staff of the Berlin University of the Arts |
Alan Kay | Table of Content | Short description, Early life and work, Subsequent work, Squeak, Etoys, and Croquet, Tweak, The Children's Machine, Reinventing programming, Personal life, Awards and honors, See also, References, External links |
APL (programming language) | Short description | APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages. |
APL (programming language) | History | History |
APL (programming language) | Mathematical notation | Mathematical notation
A mathematical notation for manipulating arrays was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson, starting in 1957 at Harvard University. In 1960, he began work for IBM where he developed this notation with Adin Falkoff and published it in his book A Programming Language in 1962. The preface states its premise:
This notation was used inside IBM for short research reports on computer systems, such as the Burroughs B5000 and its stack mechanism when stack machines versus register machines were being evaluated by IBM for upcoming computers.
Iverson also used his notation in a draft of the chapter A Programming Language, written for a book he was writing with Fred Brooks, Automatic Data Processing, which would be published in 1963.Iverson, Kenneth E., "Automatic Data Processing: Chapter 6: A programming language" , 1960, Draft copy for Brooks and Iverson 1963 book, Automatic Data Processing.Brooks, Fred; Iverson, Kenneth, (1963), Automatic Data Processing, John Wiley & Sons Inc.
In 1979, Iverson received the Turing Award for his work on APL. |
APL (programming language) | Development into a computer programming language | Development into a computer programming language
As early as 1962, the first attempt to use the notation to describe a complete computer system happened after Falkoff discussed with William C. Carter his work to standardize the instruction set for the machines that later became the IBM System/360 family.
In 1963, Herbert Hellerman, working at the IBM Systems Research Institute, implemented a part of the notation on an IBM 1620 computer, and it was used by students in a special high school course on calculating transcendental functions by series summation. Students tested their code in Hellerman's lab. This implementation of a part of the notation was called Personalized Array Translator (PAT).
In 1963, Falkoff, Iverson, and Edward H. Sussenguth Jr., all working at IBM, used the notation for a formal description of the IBM System/360 series machine architecture and functionality, which resulted in a paper published in IBM Systems Journal in 1964. After this was published, the team turned their attention to an implementation of the notation on a computer system. One of the motivations for this focus of implementation was the interest of John L. Lawrence who had new duties with Science Research Associates, an educational company bought by IBM in 1964. Lawrence asked Iverson and his group to help use the language as a tool to develop and use computers in education.
After Lawrence M. Breed and Philip S. Abrams of Stanford University joined the team at IBM Research, they continued their prior work on an implementation programmed in FORTRAN IV for a part of the notation which had been done for the IBM 7090 computer running on the IBSYS operating system. This work was finished in late 1965 and later named IVSYS (for Iverson system). The basis of this implementation was described in detail by Abrams in a Stanford University Technical Report, "An Interpreter for Iverson Notation" in 1966. The academic aspect of this was formally supervised by Niklaus Wirth.Abrams, Philip S., An interpreter for "Iverson notation", Technical Report: CS-TR-66-47, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University, August 1966; Like Hellerman's PAT system earlier, this implementation omitted the APL character set, but used special English reserved words for functions and operators. The system was later adapted for a time-sharing system and, by November 1966, it had been reprogrammed for the IBM System/360 Model 50 computer running in a time-sharing mode and was used internally at IBM. |
APL (programming language) | Hardware | Hardware
thumb|IBM typeballs and typewheel containing APL Greek characters
thumb|A programmer's view of the IBM 2741 keyboard layout with the APL typing element print head inserted
A key development in the ability to use APL effectively, before the wide use of cathode-ray tube (CRT) terminals, was the development of a special IBM Selectric typewriter interchangeable typing element with all the special APL characters on it. This was used on paper printing terminal workstations using the Selectric typewriter and typing element mechanism, such as the IBM 1050 and IBM 2741 terminal. Keycaps could be placed over the normal keys to show which APL characters would be entered and typed when that key was struck. For the first time, a programmer could type in and see proper APL characters as used in Iverson's notation and not be forced to use awkward English keyword representations of them. Falkoff and Iverson had the special APL Selectric typing elements, 987 and 988, designed in late 1964, although no APL computer system was available to use them.Breed, Larry, "The First APL Terminal Session", APL Quote Quad, Association for Computing Machinery, Volume 22, Number 1, September 1991, p. 2–4. Iverson cited Falkoff as the inspiration for the idea of using an IBM Selectric typing element for the APL character set.19, 2009 Adin Falkoff – Computer History Museum. "Iverson credited him for choosing the name APL and the introduction of the IBM golf-ball typewriter with the replacement typehead, which provided the famous character set to represent programs."
Many APL symbols, even with the APL characters on the Selectric typing element, still had to be typed in by over-striking two extant element characters. An example is the grade up character, which had to be made from a delta (shift-H) and a Sheffer stroke (shift-M). This was necessary because the APL character set was much larger than the 88 characters allowed on the typing element, even when letters were restricted to upper-case (capitals). |
APL (programming language) | Commercial availability | Commercial availability
The first APL interactive login and creation of an APL workspace was in 1966 by Larry Breed using an IBM 1050 terminal at the IBM Mohansic Labs near Thomas J. Watson Research Center, the home of APL, in Yorktown Heights, New York.
IBM was chiefly responsible for introducing APL to the marketplace. The first publicly available version of APL was released in 1968 for the IBM 1130. IBM provided APL\1130 for free but without liability or support.APL\1130 Manual , May 1969 It would run in as little as 8k 16-bit words of memory, and used a dedicated 1 megabyte hard disk.
APL gained its foothold on mainframe timesharing systems from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, in part because it would support multiple users on lower-specification systems that had no dynamic address translation hardware. Additional improvements in performance for selected IBM System/370 mainframe systems included the APL Assist Microcode in which some support for APL execution was included in the processor's firmware, as distinct from being implemented entirely by higher-level software. Somewhat later, as suitably performing hardware was finally growing available in the mid- to late-1980s, many users migrated their applications to the personal computer environment.
Early IBM APL interpreters for IBM 360 and IBM 370 hardware implemented their own multi-user management instead of relying on the host services, thus they were their own timesharing systems. First introduced for use at IBM in 1966, the APL\360Falkoff, Adin; Iverson, Kenneth E., "APL\360 Users Guide" , IBM Research, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, August 1968."APL\360 Terminal System" , IBM Research, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, March 1967. system was a multi-user interpreter. The ability to programmatically communicate with the operating system for information and setting interpreter system variables was done through special privileged "I-beam" functions, using both monadic and dyadic operations.Falkoff, Adin D.; Iverson, Kenneth E.,The Design of APL, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 17, Number 4, July 1973. "These environmental defined functions were based on the use of still another class of functions—called "I-beams" because of the shape of the symbol used for them—which provide a more general facility for communication between APL programs and the less abstract parts of the system. The I-beam functions were first introduced by the system programmers to allow them to execute System/360 instructions from within APL programs, and thus use APL as a direct aid in their programming activity. The obvious convenience of functions of this kind, which appeared to be part of the language, led to the introduction of the monadic I-beam function for direct use by anyone. Various arguments to this function yielded information about the environment such as available space and time of day."
In 1973, IBM released APL.SV, which was a continuation of the same product, but which offered shared variables as a means to access facilities outside of the APL system, such as operating system files. In the mid-1970s, the IBM mainframe interpreter was even adapted for use on the IBM 5100 desktop computer, which had a small CRT and an APL keyboard, when most other small computers of the time only offered BASIC. In the 1980s, the VSAPL program product enjoyed wide use with Conversational Monitor System (CMS), Time Sharing Option (TSO), VSPC, MUSIC/SP, and CICS users.
In 1973–1974, Patrick E. Hagerty directed the implementation of the University of Maryland APL interpreter for the 1100 line of the Sperry UNIVAC 1100/2200 series mainframe computers. In 1974, student Alan Stebbens was assigned the task of implementing an internal function. Xerox APL was available from June 1975 for Xerox 560 and Sigma 6, 7, and 9 mainframes running CP-V and for Honeywell CP-6.
In the 1960s and 1970s, several timesharing firms arose that sold APL services using modified versions of the IBM APL\360 interpreter. In North America, the better-known ones were IP Sharp Associates, Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC), Time Sharing Resources (TSR), and The Computer Company (TCC). CompuServe also entered the market in 1978 with an APL Interpreter based on a modified version of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon's, which ran on DEC's KI and KL 36-bit machines. CompuServe's APL was available both to its commercial market and the consumer information service. With the advent first of less expensive mainframes such as the IBM 4300, and later the personal computer, by the mid-1980s, the timesharing industry was all but gone.
Sharp APL was available from IP Sharp Associates, first as a timesharing service in the 1960s, and later as a program product starting around 1979. Sharp APL was an advanced APL implementation with many language extensions, such as packages (the ability to put one or more objects into a single variable), a file system, nested arrays, and shared variables.
APL interpreters were available from other mainframe and mini-computer manufacturers also, notably Burroughs, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Harris, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Siemens, Xerox and others.
Garth Foster of Syracuse University sponsored regular meetings of the APL implementers' community at Syracuse's Minnowbrook Conference Center in Blue Mountain Lake, New York. In later years, Eugene McDonnell organized similar meetings at the Asilomar Conference Grounds near Monterey, California, and at Pajaro Dunes near Watsonville, California. The SIGAPL special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery continues to support the APL community. |
APL (programming language) | Microcomputers | Microcomputers
On microcomputers, which became available from the mid-1970s onwards, BASIC became the dominant programming language. Nevertheless, some microcomputers provided APL instead – the first being the Intel 8008-based MCM/70 which was released in 1974 and which was primarily used in education. Another machine of this time was the VideoBrain Family Computer, released in 1977, which was supplied with its dialect of APL called APL/S."VideoBrain Family Computer", Popular Science, November 1978, advertisement.
The Commodore SuperPET, introduced in 1981, included an APL interpreter developed by the University of Waterloo.
In 1976, Bill Gates claimed in his Open Letter to Hobbyists that Microsoft Corporation was implementing APL for the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 but had "very little incentive to make [it] available to hobbyists" because of software piracy. It was never released. |
APL (programming language) | APL2 | APL2
Starting in the early 1980s, IBM APL development, under the leadership of Jim Brown, implemented a new version of the APL language that contained as its primary enhancement the concept of nested arrays, where an array can contain other arrays, and new language features which facilitated integrating nested arrays into program workflow. Ken Iverson, no longer in control of the development of the APL language, left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates, where one of his major contributions was directing the evolution of Sharp APL to be more in accord with his vision. APL2 was first released for CMS and TSO in 1984. The APL2 Workstation edition (Windows, OS/2, AIX, Linux, and Solaris) followed later.
As other vendors were busy developing APL interpreters for new hardware, notably Unix-based microcomputers, APL2 was almost always the standard chosen for new APL interpreter developments. Even today, most APL vendors or their users cite APL2 compatibility as a selling point for those products. IBM cites its use for problem solving, system design, prototyping, engineering and scientific computations, expert systems, for teaching mathematics and other subjects, visualization and database access. |
APL (programming language) | Modern implementations | Modern implementations
Various implementations of APL by APLX, Dyalog, et al., include extensions for object-oriented programming, support for .NET, XML-array conversion primitives, graphing, operating system interfaces, and lambda calculus expressions. Freeware versions include GNU APL for Linux and NARS2000 for Windows (which also runs on Linux under Wine). Both of these are fairly complete versions of APL2 with various language extensions. |
APL (programming language) | Derivative languages | Derivative languages
APL has formed the basis of, or influenced, the following languages:
A and A+, an alternative APL, the latter with graphical extensions.
FP, a functional programming language.
Ivy, an interpreter for an APL-like language developed by Rob Pike, and which uses ASCII as input.
J, which was also designed by Iverson, and which uses ASCII with digraphs instead of special symbols.
K, a proprietary variant of APL developed by Arthur Whitney.
MATLAB, a numerical computation tool.
Nial, a high-level array programming language with a functional programming notation.
Polymorphic Programming Language, an interactive, extensible language with a similar base language.
S, a statistical programming language (usually now seen in the open-source version known as R).
Snap!, a low-code block-based programming language, born as an extended reimplementation of Scratch
Speakeasy, a numerical computing interactive environment.
Wolfram Language, the programming language of Mathematica. |
APL (programming language) | Language characteristics | Language characteristics |
APL (programming language) | Character set | Character set
APL has been criticized and praised for its choice of a unique character set. In the 1960s and 1970s, few terminal devices or even displays could reproduce the APL character set. The most popular ones employed the IBM Selectric print mechanism used with a special APL type element. One of the early APL line terminals (line-mode operation only, not full screen) was the Texas Instruments TI Model 745 () with the full APL character set which featured half and full duplex telecommunications modes, for interacting with an APL time-sharing service or remote mainframe to run a remote computer job, remote job entry (RJE).
Over time, with the universal use of high-quality graphic displays, printing devices and Unicode support, the APL character font problem has largely been eliminated. However, entering APL characters requires the use of input method editors, keyboard mappings, virtual/on-screen APL symbol sets, or easy-reference printed keyboard cards which can frustrate beginners accustomed to other programming languages. With beginners who have no prior experience with other programming languages, a study involving high school students found that typing and using APL characters did not hinder the students in any measurable way.
In defense of APL, it requires fewer characters to type, and keyboard mappings become memorized over time. Special APL keyboards are also made and in use today, as are freely downloadable fonts for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows. The reported productivity gains assume that one spends enough time working in the language to make it worthwhile to memorize the symbols, their semantics, keyboard mappings, and many idioms for common tasks. |
APL (programming language) | Design | Design
Unlike traditionally structured programming languages, APL code is typically structured as chains of monadic or dyadic functions, and operators acting on arrays. APL has many nonstandard primitives (functions and operators) that are indicated by a single symbol or a combination of a few symbols. All primitives are defined to have the same precedence, and always associate to the right. Thus, APL is read or best understood from right-to-left.
Early APL implementations ( or so) had no programming loop control flow structures, such as do or while loops, and if-then-else constructs. Instead, they used array operations, and use of structured programming constructs was often unneeded, since an operation could be performed on a full array in one statement. For example, the iota function (ι) can replace for-loop iteration: ιN when applied to a scalar positive integer yields a one-dimensional array (vector), 1 2 3 ... N. Later APL implementations generally include comprehensive control structures, so that data structure and program control flow can be clearly and cleanly separated.
The APL environment is called a workspace. In a workspace the user can define programs and data, i.e., the data values exist also outside the programs, and the user can also manipulate the data without having to define a program. In the examples below, the APL interpreter first types six spaces before awaiting the user's input. Its own output starts in column one.
n ← 4 5 6 7 Assigns vector of values, {4 5 6 7}, to variable n, an array create operation. An equivalent yet more concise APL expression would be n ← 3 + ⍳4. Multiple values are stored in array n, the operation performed without formal loops or control flow language. n
4 5 6 7 Display the contents of n, currently an array or vector. n+4
8 9 10 11 4 is now added to all elements of vector n, creating a 4-element vector {8 9 10 11}. As above, APL's interpreter displays the result because the expression's value was not assigned to a variable (with a ←). +/n
22 APL displays the sum of components of the vector n, i.e., 22 (= 4 + 5 + 6 + 7) using a very compact notation: read +/ as "plus, over..." and a slight change would be "multiply, over..." m ← +/3+⍳4
m
22 These operations can be combined into one statement, remembering that APL evaluates expressions right to left: first ⍳4 creates an array, [1,2,3,4], then 3 is added to each component, which are summed together and the result stored in variable m, finally displayed. In normal mathematical notation, it is equivalent to: . Recall that mathematical expressions are not read or evaluated from right-to-left.
The user can save the workspace with all values, programs, and execution status.
APL uses a set of non-ASCII symbols, which are an extension of traditional arithmetic and algebraic notation. Having single character names for single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) vector functions is one way that APL enables compact formulation of algorithms for data transformation such as computing Conway's Game of Life in one line of code. In nearly all versions of APL, it is theoretically possible to express any computable function in one expression, that is, in one line of code.
Due to the unusual character set, many programmers use special keyboards with APL keytops to write APL code. Although there are various ways to write APL code using only ASCII characters, in practice it is almost never done. (This may be thought to support Iverson's thesis about notation as a tool of thought.) Most if not all modern implementations use standard keyboard layouts, with special mappings or input method editors to access non-ASCII characters. Historically, the APL font has been distinctive, with uppercase italic alphabetic characters and upright numerals and symbols. Most vendors continue to display the APL character set in a custom font.
Advocates of APL claim that the examples of so-called write-only code (badly written and almost incomprehensible code) are almost invariably examples of poor programming practice or novice mistakes, which can occur in any language. Advocates also claim that they are far more productive with APL than with more conventional computer languages, and that working software can be implemented in far less time and with far fewer programmers than using other technology.
They also may claim that because it is compact and terse, APL lends itself well to larger-scale software development and complexity, because the number of lines of code can be reduced greatly. Many APL advocates and practitioners also view standard programming languages such as COBOL and Java as being comparatively tedious. APL is often found where time-to-market is important, such as with trading systems. |
APL (programming language) | Terminology | Terminology
APL makes a clear distinction between functions and operators. Functions take arrays (variables or constants or expressions) as arguments, and return arrays as results. Operators (similar to higher-order functions) take functions or arrays as arguments, and derive related functions. For example, the sum function is derived by applying the reduction operator to the addition function. Applying the same reduction operator to the maximum function (which returns the larger of two numbers) derives a function which returns the largest of a group (vector) of numbers. In the J language, Iverson substituted the terms verb for function and adverb or conjunction for operator.
APL also identifies those features built into the language, and represented by a symbol, or a fixed combination of symbols, as primitives. Most primitives are either functions or operators. Coding APL is largely a process of writing non-primitive functions and (in some versions of APL) operators. However a few primitives are considered to be neither functions nor operators, most noticeably assignment.
Some words used in APL literature have meanings that differ from those in both mathematics and the generality of computer science.
+Terminology of APL operators Term Description function operation or mapping that takes zero, one (right) or two (left & right) arguments which may be scalars, arrays, or more complicated structures, and may return a similarly complex result. A function may be:
Primitive: built-in and represented by a single glyph;
Defined: as a named and ordered collection of program statements;
Derived: as a combination of an operator with its arguments. array data valued object of zero or more orthogonal dimensions in row-major order in which each item is a primitive scalar datum or another array. niladic not taking or requiring any arguments, nullary"Programmera i APL", Bohman, Fröberg, Studentlitteratur, monadic requiring only one argument; on the right for a function, on the left for an operator, unary dyadic requiring both a left and a right argument, binary ambivalentor monadic capable of use in a monadic or dyadic context, permitting its left argument to be elided operator operation or mapping that takes one (left) or two (left & right) function or array valued arguments (operands) and derives a function. An operator may be:
Primitive: built-in and represented by a single glyph;
Defined: as a named and ordered collection of program statements. |
APL (programming language) | Syntax | Syntax
APL has explicit representations of functions, operators, and syntax, thus providing a basis for the clear and explicit statement of extended facilities in the language, and tools to experiment on them. |
APL (programming language) | Examples | Examples |
APL (programming language) | Hello, world | Hello, world
This displays "Hello, world":
'Hello, world'
A design theme in APL is to define default actions in some cases that would produce syntax errors in most other programming languages.
The 'Hello, world' string constant above displays, because display is the default action on any expression for which no action is specified explicitly (e.g. assignment, function parameter). |
APL (programming language) | Exponentiation | Exponentiation
Another example of this theme is that exponentiation in APL is written as , which indicates raising 2 to the power 3 (this would be written as or in some languages, or relegated to a function call such as in others). Many languages use to signify multiplication, as in , but APL chooses to use . However, if no base is specified (as with the statement in APL, or in other languages), most programming languages one would see this as a syntax error. APL, however, assumes the missing base to be the natural logarithm constant e, and interprets as . |
APL (programming language) | Simple statistics | Simple statistics
Suppose that is an array of numbers. Then gives its average. Reading right-to-left, gives the number of elements in X, and since is a dyadic operator, the term to its left is required as well. It is surrounded by parentheses since otherwise X would be taken (so that the summation would be of —each element of X divided by the number of elements in X), and gives the sum of the elements of X. Building on this, the following expression computes standard deviation:
Naturally, one would define this expression as a function for repeated use rather than rewriting it each time. Further, since assignment is an operator, it can appear within an expression, so the following would place suitable values into T, AV and SD: |
APL (programming language) | ''Pick 6'' lottery numbers | Pick 6 lottery numbers
This following immediate-mode expression generates a typical set of Pick 6 lottery numbers: six pseudo-random integers ranging from 1 to 40, guaranteed non-repeating, and displays them sorted in ascending order:
x[⍋x←6?40]
The above does a lot, concisely, although it may seem complex to a new APLer. It combines the following APL functions (also called primitives and glyphs):
The first to be executed (APL executes from rightmost to leftmost) is dyadic function ? (named deal when dyadic) that returns a vector consisting of a select number (left argument: 6 in this case) of random integers ranging from 1 to a specified maximum (right argument: 40 in this case), which, if said maximum ≥ vector length, is guaranteed to be non-repeating; thus, generate/create 6 random integers ranging from 1 to 40.
This vector is then assigned (←) to the variable x, because it is needed later.
This vector is then sorted in ascending order by a monadic ⍋ function, which has as its right argument everything to the right of it up to the next unbalanced close-bracket or close-parenthesis. The result of ⍋ is the indices that will put its argument into ascending order.
Then the output of ⍋ is used to index the variable x, which we saved earlier for this purpose, thereby selecting its items in ascending sequence.
Since there is no function to the left of the left-most x to tell APL what to do with the result, it simply outputs it to the display (on a single line, separated by spaces) without needing any explicit instruction to do that.
? also has a monadic equivalent called roll, which simply returns one random integer between 1 and its sole operand [to the right of it], inclusive. Thus, a role-playing game program might use the expression ?20 to roll a twenty-sided die. |
APL (programming language) | Prime numbers | Prime numbers
The following expression finds all prime numbers from 1 to R. In both time and space, the calculation complexity is (in Big O notation).
(~R∊R∘.×R)/R←1↓⍳R
Executed from right to left, this means:
Iota ⍳ creates a vector containing integers from 1 to R (if R= 6 at the start of the program, ⍳R is 1 2 3 4 5 6)
Drop first element of this vector (↓ function), i.e., 1. So 1↓⍳R is 2 3 4 5 6
Set R to the new vector (←, assignment primitive), i.e., 2 3 4 5 6
The / replicate operator is dyadic (binary) and the interpreter first evaluates its left argument (fully in parentheses):
Generate outer product of R multiplied by R, i.e., a matrix that is the multiplication table of R by R (°.× operator), i.e.,
4 6 8 10 12 6 9 12 15 18 8 12 16 20 24 10 15 20 25 30 12 18 24 30 36
Build a vector the same length as R with 1 in each place where the corresponding number in R is in the outer product matrix (∈, set inclusion or element of or Epsilon operator), i.e., 0 0 1 0 1
Logically negate (not) values in the vector (change zeros to ones and ones to zeros) (∼, logical not or Tilde operator), i.e., 1 1 0 1 0
Select the items in R for which the corresponding element is 1 (/ replicate operator), i.e., 2 3 5
(This assumes the APL origin is 1, i.e., indices start with 1. APL can be set to use 0 as the origin, so that ι6 is 0 1 2 3 4 5, which is convenient for some calculations.) |
APL (programming language) | Sorting | Sorting
The following expression sorts a word list stored in matrix X according to word length:
X[⍋X+.≠' ';] |
APL (programming language) | Game of Life | Game of Life
The following function "life", written in Dyalog APL,Further technical details in APL Wiki's article "Conway's Game of Life". Retrieved November 20, 2021. takes a Boolean matrix and calculates the new generation according to Conway's Game of Life. It demonstrates the power of APL to implement a complex algorithm in very little code, but understanding it requires some advanced knowledge of APL (as the same program would in many languages).
life ← {⊃1 ⍵ ∨.∧ 3 4 = +/ +⌿ ¯1 0 1 ∘.⊖ ¯1 0 1 ⌽¨ ⊂⍵} |
APL (programming language) | HTML tags removal | HTML tags removal
In the following example, also Dyalog, the first line assigns some HTML code to a variable txt and then uses an APL expression to remove all the HTML tags:
txt←'<html><body><p>This is <em>emphasized</em> text.</p></body></html>'
{⍵ /⍨ ~{⍵∨≠\⍵}⍵∊'<>'} txt
This is emphasized text. |
APL (programming language) | Naming | Naming
APL derives its name from the initials of Iverson's book A Programming Language, even though the book describes Iverson's mathematical notation, rather than the implemented programming language described in this article. The name is used only for actual implementations, starting with APL\360.
Adin Falkoff coined the name in 1966 during the implementation of APL\360 at IBM:
APL is occasionally re-interpreted as Array Programming Language or Array Processing Language,Acharya, R; Pereira, (904567457)
N.E. APL Programming Language . Paper for CS5314 (Concepts of Programming Languages) at Virginia Tech. thereby making APL into a backronym. |
APL (programming language) | Logo | Logo
thumb|British APL Association (BAPLA) conference laptop bag
There has always been cooperation between APL vendors, and joint conferences were held on a regular basis from 1969 until 2010.APL Wiki. APL Conference. Retrieved 13 Oct 2021. At such conferences, APL merchandise was often handed out, featuring APL motifs or collection of vendor logos. Common were apples (as a pun on the similarity in pronunciation of apple and APL) and the code snippet which are the symbols produced by the classic APL keyboard layout when holding the APL modifier key and typing "APL".
Despite all these community efforts, no universal vendor-agnostic logo for the programming language emerged. As popular programming languages increasingly have established recognisable logos, Fortran getting one in 2020,Jacob Williams. Degenerate Conic: New Blood. Retrieved 13 Oct 2021. British APL Association launched a campaign in the second half of 2021, to establish such a logo for APL, and after a community election and multiple rounds of feedback, a logo was chosen in May 2022.APL Wiki. APL logo. Retrieved 20 May 2022. |
APL (programming language) | Use | Use
APL is used for many purposes including financial and insurance applications, artificial intelligence,
neural networks
and robotics. It has been argued that APL is a calculation tool and not a programming language; its symbolic nature and array capabilities have made it popular with domain experts and data scientists who do not have or require the skills of a computer programmer.
APL is well suited to image manipulation and computer animation, where graphic transformations can be encoded as matrix multiplications. One of the first commercial computer graphics houses, Digital Effects, produced an APL graphics product named Visions, which was used to create television commercials and animation for the 1982 film Tron. Latterly, the Stormwind boating simulator uses APL to implement its core logic, its interfacing to the rendering pipeline middleware and a major part of its physics engine.
Today, APL remains in use in a wide range of commercial and scientific applications, for example
investment management,
asset management,
health care,
and DNA profiling. |
APL (programming language) | Notable implementations | Notable implementations |
APL (programming language) | APL\360 | APL\360
The first implementation of APL using recognizable APL symbols was APL\360 which ran on the IBM System/360, and was completed in November 1966 though at that time remained in use only within IBM. In 1973 its implementors, Larry Breed, Dick Lathwell and Roger Moore, were awarded the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It was given "for their work in the design and implementation of APL\360, setting new standards in simplicity, efficiency, reliability and response time for interactive systems."
In 1975, the IBM 5100 microcomputer offered APL\360 as one of two built-in ROM-based interpreted languages for the computer, complete with a keyboard and display that supported all the special symbols used in the language.
Significant developments to APL\360 included CMS/APL, which made use of the virtual storage capabilities of CMS and APLSV, which introduced shared variables, system variables and system functions. It was subsequently ported to the IBM System/370 and VSPC platforms until its final release in 1983, after which it was replaced by APL2. |
APL (programming language) | APL\1130 | APL\1130
In 1968, APL\1130 became the first publicly available APL system, created by IBM for the IBM 1130. It became the most popular IBM Type-III Library software that IBM released. |
APL (programming language) | APL*Plus and Sharp APL | APL*Plus and Sharp APL
APL*Plus and Sharp APL are versions of APL\360 with added business-oriented extensions such as data formatting and facilities to store APL arrays in external files. They were jointly developed by two companies, employing various members of the original IBM APL\360 development team.
The two companies were I. P. Sharp Associates (IPSA), an APL\360 services company formed in 1964 by Ian Sharp, Roger Moore and others, and STSC, a time-sharing and consulting service company formed in 1969 by Lawrence Breed and others. Together the two developed APL*Plus and thereafter continued to work together but develop APL separately as APL*Plus and Sharp APL. STSC ported APL*Plus to many platforms with versions being made for the VAX 11, PC and UNIX, whereas IPSA took a different approach to the arrival of the personal computer and made Sharp APL available on this platform using additional PC-XT/360 hardware. In 1993, Soliton Incorporated was formed to support Sharp APL and it developed Sharp APL into SAX (Sharp APL for Unix). , APL*Plus continues as APL2000 APL+Win.
In 1985, Ian Sharp, and Dan Dyer of STSC, jointly received the Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL. |
APL (programming language) | APL2 | APL2
APL2 was a significant re-implementation of APL by IBM which was developed from 1971 and first released in 1984. It provides many additions to the language, of which the most notable is nested (non-rectangular) array support. The entire APL2 Products and Services Team was awarded the Iverson Award in 2007.
In 2021, IBM sold APL2 to Log-On Software, who develop and sell the product as Log-On APL2. |
APL (programming language) | APLGOL | APLGOL
In 1972, APLGOL was released as an experimental version of APL that added structured programming language constructs to the language framework. New statements were added for interstatement control, conditional statement execution, and statement structuring, as well as statements to clarify the intent of the algorithm. It was implemented for Hewlett-Packard in 1977. |
APL (programming language) | Dyalog APL | Dyalog APL
Dyalog APL was first released by British company Dyalog Ltd. in 1983 and, , is available for AIX, Linux (including on the Raspberry Pi), macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms. It is based on APL2, with extensions to support object-oriented programming, functional programming, and tacit programming. Licences are free for personal/non-commercial use.
In 1995, two of the development team – John Scholes and Peter Donnelly – were awarded the Iverson Award for their work on the interpreter. Gitte Christensen and Morten Kromberg were joint recipients of the Iverson Award in 2016. |
APL (programming language) | NARS2000 | NARS2000
NARS2000 is an open-source APL interpreter written by Bob Smith, a prominent APL developer and implementor from STSC in the 1970s and 1980s. NARS2000 contains advanced features and new datatypes and runs natively on Microsoft Windows, and other platforms under Wine. It is named after a development tool from the 1980s, NARS (Nested Arrays Research System). |
APL (programming language) | APLX | APLX
APLX is a cross-platform dialect of APL, based on APL2 and with several extensions, which was first released by British company MicroAPL in 2002. Although no longer in development or on commercial sale it is now available free of charge from Dyalog. |
APL (programming language) | York APL | York APL
York APL was developed at the York University, Ontario around 1968, running on IBM 360 mainframes. One notable difference between it and APL\360 was that it defined the "shape" (ρ) of a scalar as 1 whereas APL\360 defined it as the more mathematically correct 0 — this made it easier to write functions that acted the same with scalars and vectors. |
APL (programming language) | GNU APL | GNU APL
GNU APL is a free implementation of Extended APL as specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001 and is thus an implementation of APL2. It runs on Linux, macOS, several BSD dialects, and on Windows (either using Cygwin for full support of all its system functions or as a native 64-bit Windows binary with some of its system functions missing). GNU APL uses Unicode internally and can be scripted. It was written by Jürgen Sauermann.
Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, was an early adopter of APL, using it to write a text editor as a high school student in the summer of 1969. |
APL (programming language) | Interpretation and compilation of APL | Interpretation and compilation of APL
APL is traditionally an interpreted language, having language characteristics such as weak variable typing not well suited to compilation. However, with arrays as its core data structure it provides opportunities for performance gains through parallelism, parallel computing, massively parallel applications, and very-large-scale integration (VLSI), and from the outset APL has been regarded as a high-performance language – for example, it was noted for the speed with which it could perform complicated matrix operations "because it operates on arrays and performs operations like matrix inversion internally".
Nevertheless, APL is rarely purely interpreted and compilation or partial compilation techniques that are, or have been, used include the following: |
APL (programming language) | Idiom recognition | Idiom recognition
Most APL interpreters support idiom recognition and evaluate common idioms as single operations. For example, by evaluating the idiom BV/⍳⍴A as a single operation (where BV is a Boolean vector and A is an array), the creation of two intermediate arrays is avoided. |
APL (programming language) | Optimised bytecode | Optimised bytecode
Weak typing in APL means that a name may reference an array (of any datatype), a function or an operator. In general, the interpreter cannot know in advance which form it will be and must therefore perform analysis, syntax checking etc. at run-time. However, in certain circumstances, it is possible to deduce in advance what type a name is expected to reference and then generate bytecode which can be executed with reduced run-time overhead. This bytecode can also be optimised using compilation techniques such as constant folding or common subexpression elimination. The interpreter will execute the bytecode when present and when any assumptions which have been made are met. Dyalog APL includes support for optimised bytecode. |
APL (programming language) | Compilation | Compilation
Compilation of APL has been the subject of research and experiment since the language first became available; the first compiler is considered to be the Burroughs APL-700 which was released around 1971. In order to be able to compile APL, language limitations have to be imposed. APEX is a research APL compiler which was written by Robert Bernecky and is available under the GNU General Public License.
The STSC APL Compiler is a hybrid of a bytecode optimiser and a compiler – it enables compilation of functions to machine code provided that its sub-functions and globals are declared, but the interpreter is still used as a runtime library and to execute functions which do not meet the compilation requirements. |
APL (programming language) | Standards | Standards
APL has been standardized by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) working group X3J10 and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 Subcommittee 22 Working Group 3. The Core APL language is specified in ISO 8485:1989, and the Extended APL language is specified in ISO/IEC 13751:2001. |
APL (programming language) | References | References |
APL (programming language) | Further reading | Further reading
An APL Machine (1970 Stanford doctoral dissertation by Philip Abrams)
A Personal History Of APL (1982 article by Michael S. Montalbano)
A Programming Language by Kenneth E. Iverson
APL in Exposition by Kenneth E. Iverson
Brooks, Frederick P.; Kenneth Iverson (1965). Automatic Data Processing, System/360 Edition. .
|
APL (programming language) | Video | Video
– a 1974 talk show style interview with the original developers of APL.
– a 1975 live demonstration of APL by Professor Bob Spence, Imperial College London.
– a 2009 tutorial by John Scholes of Dyalog Ltd. which implements Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL.
– a 2009 introduction to APL by Graeme Robertson. |
APL (programming language) | External links | External links |
APL (programming language) | Online resources | Online resources
TryAPL.org, an online APL primer
APL2C, a source of links to APL compilers
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APL (programming language) | Table of Content | Short description, History, Mathematical notation, Development into a computer programming language, Hardware, Commercial availability, Microcomputers, APL2, Modern implementations, Derivative languages, Language characteristics, Character set, Design, Terminology, Syntax, Examples, Hello, world, Exponentiation, Simple statistics, ''Pick 6'' lottery numbers, Prime numbers, Sorting, Game of Life, HTML tags removal, Naming, Logo, Use, Notable implementations, APL\360, APL\1130, APL*Plus and Sharp APL, APL2, APLGOL, Dyalog APL, NARS2000, APLX, York APL, GNU APL, Interpretation and compilation of APL, Idiom recognition, Optimised bytecode, Compilation, Standards, References, Further reading, Video, External links, Online resources |
ALGOL | Short description | ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language")The name of this language family is sometimes given in mixed case (Algol 60 ), and sometimes in all uppercase (ALGOL68 ). For simplicity this article uses ALGOL. is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years.Collected Algorithms of the ACM Compressed archives of the algorithms. ACM.
In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL."The ALGOL Programming Language" , University of Michigan-Dearborn It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, Ada, and C.
ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin...end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detailed attention to formal language definition and through the Algol 60 Report introduced Backus–Naur form, a principal formal grammar notation for language design.
There were three major specifications, named after the years they were first published:
ALGOL 58 – originally proposed to be called IAL, for International Algebraic Language.
ALGOL 60 – first implemented as X1 ALGOL 60 in 1961. Revised 1963.
ALGOL 68 – introduced new elements including flexible arrays, slices, parallelism, operator identification. Revised 1973.
ALGOL 68 is substantially different from ALGOL 60 and was not well received, so reference to "Algol" is generally understood to mean ALGOL 60 and its dialects. |
ALGOL | History | History
ALGOL was developed jointly by a committee of European and American computer scientists in a meeting in 1958 at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (cf. ALGOL 58). It specified three different syntaxes: a reference syntax, a publication syntax, and an implementation syntax, syntaxes that permitted it to use different keyword names and conventions for decimal points (commas vs periods) for different languages.
ALGOL was used mostly by research computer scientists in the United States and in Europe; commercial applications were hindered by the absence of standard input/output facilities in its description, and the lack of interest in the language by large computer vendors (other than Burroughs Corporation). ALGOL 60 did however become the standard for the publication of algorithms and had a profound effect on future language development.
thumb|alt=caption|Family tree of the Algol, Fortran and COBOL programming language dynasty
John Backus developed the Backus normal form method of describing programming languages specifically for ALGOL 58. It was revised and expanded by Peter Naur for ALGOL 60, and at Donald Knuth's suggestion renamed Backus–Naur form.
Peter Naur: "As editor of the ALGOL Bulletin I was drawn into the international discussions of the language and was selected to be member of the European language design group in November 1959. In this capacity I was the editor of the ALGOL 60 report, produced as the result of the ALGOL 60 meeting in Paris in January 1960."ACM Award Citation: Peter Naur , 2005
The following people attended the meeting in Paris (from 11 to 16 January):
Friedrich Ludwig Bauer, Peter Naur, Heinz Rutishauser, Klaus Samelson, Bernard Vauquois, Adriaan van Wijngaarden, and Michael Woodger (from Europe)
John Warner Backus, Julien Green, Charles Katz, John McCarthy, Alan Jay Perlis, and Joseph Henry Wegstein (from the US).
Alan Perlis gave a vivid description of the meeting: "The meetings were exhausting, interminable, and exhilarating. One became aggravated when one's good ideas were discarded along with the bad ones of others. Nevertheless, diligence persisted during the entire period. The chemistry of the 13 was excellent." |
ALGOL | Legacy | Legacy
A significant contribution of the ALGOL 58 Report was to provide standard terms for programming concepts: statement, declaration, type, label, primary, block, and others.
ALGOL 60 inspired many languages that followed it. Tony Hoare remarked: "Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors.""Hints on Programming Language Design" , C.A.R. Hoare, December 1973. Page 27. (This statement is sometimes erroneously attributed to Edsger W. Dijkstra, also involved in implementing the first ALGOL 60 compiler.) The Scheme programming language, a variant of Lisp that adopted the block structure and lexical scope of ALGOL, also adopted the wording "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme" for its standards documents in homage to ALGOL. |
ALGOL | Properties | Properties
ALGOL 60 as officially defined had no I/O facilities; implementations defined their own in ways that were rarely compatible with each other. In contrast, ALGOL 68 offered an extensive library of transput (input/output) facilities.
ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter passing: the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name has certain effects in contrast to call-by-reference. For example, without specifying the parameters as value or reference, it is impossible to develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an array that is indexed by that same integer variable., Section 7.5, and references therein Think of passing a pointer to swap(i, A[i]) in to a function. Now that every time swap is referenced, it is reevaluated. Say i := 1 and A[i] := 2, so every time swap is referenced it will return the other combination of the values ([1,2], [2,1], [1,2] and so on). A similar situation occurs with a random function passed as actual argument.
Call-by-name is known by many compiler designers for the interesting "thunks" that are used to implement it. Donald Knuth devised the "man or boy test" to separate compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references." This test contains an example of call-by-name.
ALGOL 68 was defined using a two-level grammar formalism invented by Adriaan van Wijngaarden and which bears his name. Van Wijngaarden grammars use a context-free grammar to generate an infinite set of productions that will recognize a particular ALGOL 68 program; notably, they are able to express the kind of requirements that in many other programming language standards are labelled "semantics" and have to be expressed in ambiguity-prone natural language prose, and then implemented in compilers as ad hoc code attached to the formal language parser. |
ALGOL | Examples and portability | Examples and portability |
ALGOL | Code sample comparisons | Code sample comparisons |
ALGOL | ALGOL 60 | ALGOL 60
(The way the bold text has to be written depends on the implementation, e.g. 'INTEGER'—quotation marks included—for integer. This is known as stropping.)
procedure Absmax(a) Size:(n, m) Result:(y) Subscripts:(i, k);
value n, m; array a; integer n, m, i, k; real y;
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size n by m,
is copied to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k;
begin
integer p, q;
y := 0; i := k := 1;
for p := 1 step 1 until n do
for q := 1 step 1 until m do
if abs(a[p, q]) > y then
begin y := abs(a[p, q]);
i := p; k := q
end
end Absmax
Here is an example of how to produce a table using Elliott 803 ALGOL."803 ALGOL" , the manual for Elliott 803 ALGOL
FLOATING POINT ALGOL TEST'
BEGIN REAL A,B,C,D'
READ D'
FOR A:= 0.0 STEP D UNTIL 6.3 DO
BEGIN
PRINT ,££L??'
B := SIN(A)'
C := COS(A)'
PRINT PUNCH(3),,,A,B,C'
END
END' |
ALGOL | ALGOL 68 | ALGOL 68
The following code samples are ALGOL 68 versions of the above ALGOL 60 code samples.
ALGOL 68 implementations used ALGOL 60's approaches to stropping. In ALGOL 68's case tokens with the bold typeface are reserved words, types (modes) or operators.
proc abs max = ([,]real a, ref real y, ref int i, k)real:
comment The absolute greatest element of the matrix a, of size ⌈a by 2⌈a
is transferred to y, and the subscripts of this element to i and k; comment
begin
real y := 0; i := ⌊a; k := 2⌊a;
for p from ⌊a to ⌈a do
for q from 2⌊a to 2⌈a do
if abs a[p, q] > y then
y := abs a[p, q];
i := p; k := q
fi
od
od;
y
end # abs max #
Note: lower (⌊) and upper (⌈) bounds of an array, and array slicing, are directly available to the programmer.
floating point algol68 test:
(
real a,b,c,d;
# printf – sends output to the file stand out. #
# printf($p$); – selects a new page #
printf(($pg$,"Enter d:"));
read(d);
for step from 0 while a:=step*d; a <= 2*pi do
printf($l$); # $l$ - selects a new line. #
b := sin(a);
c := cos(a);
printf(($z-d.6d$,a,b,c)) # formats output with 1 digit before and 6 after the decimal point. #
od
) |
ALGOL | Timeline: Hello world | Timeline: Hello world
The variations and lack of portability of the programs from one implementation to another is easily demonstrated by the classic hello world program. |
ALGOL | ALGOL 58 (IAL) | ALGOL 58 (IAL)
ALGOL 58 had no I/O facilities. |
ALGOL | ALGOL 60 family | ALGOL 60 family
Since ALGOL 60 had no I/O facilities, there is no portable hello world program in ALGOL.
The next three examples are in Burroughs Extended Algol. The first two direct output at the interactive terminal they are run on. The first uses a character array, similar to C. The language allows the array identifier to be used as a pointer to the array, and hence in a REPLACE statement.
A simpler program using an inline format:
An even simpler program using the Display statement. Note that its output would end up at the system console ('SPO'):
An alternative example, using Elliott Algol I/O is as follows. Elliott Algol used different characters for "open-string-quote" and "close-string-quote", represented here by and .
Below is a version from Elliott 803 Algol (A104). The standard Elliott 803 used five-hole paper tape and thus only had upper case. The code lacked any quote characters so £ (UK Pound Sign) was used for open quote and ? (Question Mark) for close quote. Special sequences were placed in double quotes (e.g£. £L?? produced a new line on the teleprinter).
HIFOLKS'
BEGIN
PRINT £HELLO WORLD£L??'
END'
The ICT 1900 series Algol I/O version allowed input from paper tape or punched card. Paper tape 'full' mode allowed lower case. Output was to a line printer. The open and close quote characters were represented using '(' and ')' and spaces by %.
'BEGIN'
WRITE TEXT('('HELLO%WORLD')');
'END' |
ALGOL | ALGOL 68 | ALGOL 68
ALGOL 68 code was published with reserved words typically in lowercase, but bolded or underlined.
begin
printf(($gl$,"Hello, world!"))
end
In the language of the "Algol 68 Report" the input/output facilities were collectively called the "Transput". |
ALGOL | Timeline of ALGOL special characters | Timeline of ALGOL special characters
The ALGOLs were conceived at a time when character sets were diverse and evolving rapidly; also, the ALGOLs were defined so that only uppercase letters were required.
1960: IFIP – The Algol 60 language and report included several mathematical symbols which are available on modern computers and operating systems, but, unfortunately, were unsupported on most computing systems at the time. For instance: ×, ÷, ≤, ≥, ≠, ¬, ∨, ∧, ⊂, ≡, ␣ and ⏨.
1961 September: ASCII – The ASCII character set, then in an early stage of development, had the \ (Back slash) character added to it in order to support ALGOL's Boolean operators /\ and \/.How ASCII Got Its Backslash , Bob Bemer
1962: ALCOR – This character set included the unusual "᛭" runic crossiron/runic cross character for multiplication and the "⏨" Decimal Exponent SymbolDecimal Exponent Symbol for floating point notation.
1964: GOST – The 1964 Soviet standard GOST 10859 allowed the encoding of 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit and 7-bit characters in ALGOL.
1968: The "Algol 68 Report" – used extant ALGOL characters, and further adopted →, ↓, ↑, □, ⌊, ⌈, ⎩, ⎧, ○, ⊥, and ¢ characters which can be found on the IBM 2741 keyboard with typeball (or golf ball) print heads inserted (such as the APL golf ball). These became available in the mid-1960s while ALGOL 68 was being drafted. The report was translated into Russian, German, French, and Bulgarian, and allowed programming in languages with larger character sets, e.g., Cyrillic alphabet of the Soviet BESM-4. All ALGOL's characters are also part of the Unicode standard and most of them are available in several popular fonts.
2009 October: Unicode – The ⏨ (Decimal Exponent Symbol) for floating point notation was added to Unicode 5.2 for backward compatibility with historic Buran programme ALGOL software. |
ALGOL | ALGOL implementations | ALGOL implementations
To date there have been at least 70 augmentations, extensions, derivations and sublanguages of Algol 60.
NameYearAuthorCountryDescriptionTarget CPU ZMMD-implementation 1958 Friedrich L. Bauer, Heinz Rutishauser, Klaus Samelson, Hermann Bottenbruch implementation of ALGOL 58 Z22 (later Zuse's Z23 was delivered with an Algol 60 compiler)Computer Museum History , Historical Zuse-Computer Z23, restored by the Konrad Zuse Schule in Hünfeld, for the Computer Museum History Center in Mountain View (California) USX1 ALGOL 60 1960 August Edsger W. Dijkstra and Jaap A. Zonneveld First implementation of ALGOL 60 Electrologica X1Elliott ALGOL 1960s C. A. R. Hoare Subject of the 1980 Turing Award Lecture Elliott 803, Elliott 503, Elliott 4100 seriesJOVIAL 1960 Jules Schwartz A DOD HOL prior to Ada Various (see article)Burroughs Algol (Several variants) 1961 Burroughs Corporation (with participation by Hoare, Dijkstra, and others) Basis of the Burroughs (and now Unisys MCP based) computers Burroughs Large Systems and their midrange also.Case ALGOL 1961 Case Institute of Technology Simula was originally contracted as a simulation extension of the Case ALGOL UNIVAC 1107GOGOL 1961 William M. McKeeman For ODIN time-sharing system PDP-1RegneCentralen ALGOL 1961 Peter Naur, Jørn Jensen Implementation of full Algol 60 DASK at RegnecentralenDartmouth ALGOL 30 1962 Thomas Eugene Kurtz et al. LGP-30USS 90 Algol 1962 L. Petrone ALGOL 601962Bernard Vauquois, Louis Bolliet Institut d'Informatique et Mathématiques Appliquées de Grenoble (IMAG) and Compagnie des Machines BullBull Gamma 60 Algol Translator 1962 G. van der Mey and W.L. van der Poel Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie ZEBRAKidsgrove Algol 1963 F. G. Duncan English Electric Company KDF9VALGOL 1963 Val Schorre A test of the META II compiler compilerWhetstone 1964 Brian Randell and L. J. Russell Atomic Power Division of English Electric Company. Precursor to Ferranti Pegasus, National Physical Laboratories ACE and English Electric DEUCE implementations. English Electric Company KDF9NU ALGOL 1965 UNIVACALGEK 1965 АЛГЭК, based on ALGOL-60 and COBOL support, for economical tasks Minsk-22ALGOL W 1966 Niklaus Wirth Proposed successor to ALGOL 60 IBM System/360MALGOL 1966 publ. A. Viil, M Kotli & M. Rakhendi, Minsk-22ALGAMS 1967 GAMS group (ГАМС, группа автоматизации программирования для машин среднего класса), cooperation of Comecon Academies of Science Comecon Minsk-22, later ES EVM, BESMALGOL/ZAM 1967 Polish ZAM computerSimula 67 1967 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard Algol 60 with classes UNIVAC 1107Triplex-ALGOL Karlsruhe 1967/1968 Karlsruhe, ALGOL 60 (1963) with triplex numbers for interval arithmetic Chinese Algol 1972 Chinese characters, expressed via the Symbol systemDG/L 1972 DG Eclipse family of ComputersS-algol 1979 Ron Morrison Addition of orthogonal datatypes with intended use as a teaching language PDP-11 with a subsequent implementation on the Java VM
The Burroughs dialects included special Bootstrapping dialects such as ESPOL and NEWP. The latter is still used for Unisys MCP system software. |
ALGOL | See also | See also |
ALGOL | References | References |
ALGOL | Further reading | Further reading
. On the design of the Whetstone Compiler, and one of the early published descriptions of implementing a compiler.
|