Talk:LYaPAS

If the development of LYaPAS began in 1962, how could it possibly be inspired by A Programming Language which had only just been published? Adám Brudzewsky (talk) 11:16, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

Good question. I think, this is some kind of mistake, probably attributed to Wikipedia. LYaPAS indeed looks very different from APL to me.

I think, it might have developed from Klaus Samelson's ideas of "A formula-controlled computer" (1957, see the article by Knuth and Trabb Pardo [1], p. 90). It was presented in 1955 in Dresden, a territory controlled by Soviet Union, so this influence is much more plausible than that of APL.

I moved the information to Wikipedia, so this article can be deleted. --Andrii Makukha (talk) 12:16, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

The origin of this mistake is probably the HOPL.info website, which claims that LYaPAS is "a symbolic extension of APL".

As for the Russian-language literature, the only mentions of APL in LYaPAS context I found are these:[2]

APL was more fit to describe logical procedures than other languages [9], however, by that time, it was not implemented even in its country of origin. And even now its interpreters are more widespread than compilers.

Also, from the same article:

Author of the translation [27] Norton Nadler organized "User Group for Russian Programming Language" in the US. In his announcement, he wrote the following assessment of LYaPAS: "Having been designed for implementation on Soviet computers, it is remarkably efficient, both in compiler memory and running time requirements, and in object program parameters. Suffice it to say that there exist a Ural-1 version (as if APL had been implemented on the IBM 650!)"

This Norton Nadler's mention of APL in his announcement might have caused the confusion. --Andrii Makukha (talk) 18:38, 1 September 2020 (UTC)

I finished reading LYaPAS-70 description and can confirm that it is in no way "a symbolic extension of APL".

LYaPAS is relatively low-level. And it's closer to assembly than to C. It has neither file nor worksheet abstraction. It even puts much of the burden of heap management on the programmers, allowing them to write to specific memory cells directly. It doesn't have floating-point numbers, neither it has basic APL functions such as reshape, reverse, transpose, matrix inverse, grade up, etc. Even 2D-arrays are ugly and limited in LYaPAS. --Andrii Makukha (talk) 00:23, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

From the book LyaPas A Programming Language for Logic and Coding Algorithms edited by Gavrilov and Zakrevskii:

In the Chapter "Description of LYapAS" by A.D. Zakreskii, section "E. Perspectives and some comparisons" p8, it is written :

Of those languages known to the author, the closest in purpose to LYaPAS is the language of Iverson [3], whose results were taken into account in the development of LyaPas.

The reference [3] in the book is : Iverson, K.E., "A Programming Language." New York, London, 1963