APL Wiki:Content guidelines: Difference between revisions

The APL Wiki is focused on APL, which is somewhat problematic because APL has no agreed-upon definition. We might say in a strict sense that APL, or "an APL", is a programming language that encodes [[Iverson notation]] in a text-based and machine-executable form, using the conventions established by the first such language to be broadly available, [[APL\360]]. However, because the APL Wiki should serve even remote corners of the APL world, we would like to take a broader definition of APL that also includes later developments that some people consider part of APL and some don't. Other definitions of APL or APL features might include:

* The original [[IBM]] implementation of APL, [[APL\360]]

* A language which is typically called "APL" by the APL community

* A language that uses the central concepts of Iverson's APL, like [[array]]s as the fundamental datatype, [[glyph]]s to represent [[primitive function|primitive functions]] and [[primitive operator|operators]], infix notation, and [[Evaluation order|right-to-left]] evaluation

The APL Wiki takes no position on what can be called "APL", and this question is not important to its content (when in doubt, a controversial APL such as [[J]] may be called a "language" rather than an "APL" or "dialect"). Instead, an editor should consider the task of balancing how central a concept is to APL against its prominence and placement in the APL Wiki. See [[#Due weight]] below.