[FoRK] Kdb+ now available free for non-commercial use (or something)

[Jeff Bone]

On Apr 10, 2008, at 9:09 AM, Dave Long wrote:

> I haven't looked closely enough at the Kdb+ material to see what  
> they have for introductory material; when first looking at J I found  
> it useful going through Iverson's publications, eg. his Turing award  
> lecture, just to retrain my eye.  (a friend who was studying russian  
> once remarked that at the start it felt like "being in kindergarten  
> on mars")  It was also interesting to notice that, in retrospect,  
> the relative paucity of control structures in APL may have been  
> partly due to Iverson's fondness of recursive definitions to  
> generate fixpoints.

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree;  Whitney's preferences track  
his mentor's pretty closely.

Nonetheless I've found the Kdb+/q sample code a lot easier to read  
than any J I've ever seen;  vs. APL the jury's out, as the extended  
character set there is actually sort of expressive --- not sure that  
either Kdb+/q or J is as readable in some cases as well-written APL,  
though in other ways I think there's some positive notational progress  
inherent in Kdb+ (for example, its representation of lambda, and the  
implicit assignment of arguments for up tp to ternary functions...   
better even than Arc in the case of the latter!)

jb