Conway's Game Of Life in APL

Click this link for the high resolution version with clearer text :)
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKtt...

There is a "Game of Life" tutorial at http://tryapl.org, which allows you to step through the game of life expressions interactively.

Good places to start learning about APL are the Vector website (run by the British APL Association) http://www.vector.org.uk where there is a list of current APL books, the APL Wiki at http://aplwiki.com/ , and the Dyalog website http://www.dyalog.com which has links to for obtaining a personal (non-commercial) licence for our APL interpreter if you like learning by doing :) There are also links to some forums and discussing groups on both sites where you will find people who know APL inside and out...

You can also try APL online at http://tryapl.org/

Conway's Game Of Life in APL

• Category

  Science & Technology

[Chris Wright]

how come iota 9 -> 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8....

on my clean dyalog install iota 9 -> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

is this configurable?

[DyalogLtd]

You can set ⎕IO (that's quad eye oh) to either 0 or 1 under "options | Configure | Session", or temporarily by assigning to it in the session. According to the manual "⎕IO determines the index of first element of a non-empty array", Iota N generates a vector of N indices, starting at ⎕IO.

In a new installation of Dyalog APL ⎕IO is set to 1, but many people prefer to start indexing at 0, and so change it in the options section.

Hope that helps :)

[EternalVinay]

Hi,

I just finished my Masters, last month.

I am very interested to learn APL just to satisfy my own immense curiosity.

can I please get a copy of the dyalog apl please?

[DyalogLtd]

If you email sales@dyalog.com you should be able to register for either a free educational licence, or very cheap non-commercial licence, depending on how you intend to use Dyalog APL. They will be able to advise you of the various options available.

[coefficient]

I've never been good at matrix math, I'm sure I'd just spend any time in this language blinking at the terminal wondering what to type. Great video, but I'll stick w/ functional programing, slightly less humiliating

[AerobicRobot]

My brain just exploded, holy shit, it all makes sense.

[fred08830]

Yikes! APL sure has changed since I last used it back in in the early 1990s.

[James Wood]

I translated it into J, but YouTube won't allow me to post it. It thinks J code ASCII art! I'm not joking.

[codeandcoffeh]

Practice allows one to asymptotically approach perfection.

[rrcarroll252]

Over my head, but something I can aspire to. Thank you.

[Big Wig]

I think it is By Stan Kelly-Bootle

[Big Wig]

There was this saying about APL

There are three things

a man must do

before his life is done

write two lines of APL

and make the buggers run

[kaoD]

Having a hard time translating this to J, damn charset!

[Paganel75]

Of course, it does : life begins with small self-replicating sequences emerging from random situations :-)

You can make a more complicated simulation where you have a God engineering and creating life, but you will need a lot more of available processing power and memory to simulate Him first.

[Paganel75]

Using your favorite Internet translator on the French Wikipedia, is the following feature, badly missing in IBM's APL2 present in one way or another in Dyalog APL ?

APL_(langage)#Lacune_d.E2.80.9­9APL

[Paganel75]

A good joke to make to a trainee is to set his/her quadLX to 'quadIO takes '1'.

A lot of things do not work anymore. Eventually the trainee will change quadIO to 0 (number) test everything works again, set back quadIO to 1 (number), work normally again, save... and retrieve his/her problems at the next )LOAD

Dirty trick, but funny welcome joke, especially when the trainee understands at las what is going on ;-)