An empirical study of APL programs

Abstract

The statistical results of a study of the static usage of features of the APL language is presented. The distributions of the appearance of the APL primitive functions and the functions derived from the APL operators are presented. APL users appear to use extremely heavily only a small fraction of the available features. The paper compares several characterizations of APL programs with previously measured FORTRAN data, and discusses the significant differences observed. © 1977.