Q'Nial: A portable interpreter for the nested interactive array language, Nial

Abstract

The Q'Nial interpreter combines ideas from APL and Lisp implementations to provide a rich prosrpmmins environment that supports several paradigms of programming. The interpreter is structured to d e c t the division of Nial semantics into levels corresponding to zero-, firstand second-order objects. The paper describes the design of the interpreter, discusses constraints imposed by the desire to achieve portability and comments on what has been learned in building an interpmtes in this style. EEY WORDS Interpreter Nial Arrays Interactive programming language AN OVERVIEW OF NIALNial implements the latest version of More's array theory.* The main focus of array theory is on data and its representation as nested rectangular arrays. All data objects 'Earlier versions of the theory served as the basis for the nested arrays of IBM's APL2' and STSC's extended APL.S Oo3&0644/89/020 1 1 1-1 6808 .OO

Array theory and the nial programming language

“…The Q'Nial implementation of Nial has been undertaken at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario by a group headed by Michael A. Jenkins of the Department of Computing and Information Science working in collaboration with the Cambridge Scientific Center and with colleagues in Canada, the United States and Europe [3,6,12]. The Q'Nial interpreter has been written in C so that it may be transported relatively simply to any system supporting a C compiler.…”

“…An area of current major interest is artificial intelligence and the development of prototype expert systems !-2, 4]. Research in the statistical applications of Nial includes the development of a statistical package and methods for its efficient documentation and simple description [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Other work includes the use of Nial in forest science both for teaching quantitative techniques and for studying methods of integrating the data description and analysis aspects of report preparation 1-1].…”

Descriptor-Free Representation of Arrays with Dependent Types

“…Many array languages like MatLab [2], Apl [13,1], J [14] or Nial [15] are interpreted and untyped. These languages are known for offering a plethora of well optimised operators for each array operation supported by the language.…”

A Fifth Generation Approach to Problem-Solving in Forest Mensuration and Sampling

“…Nial was developed by Trenchard More (1 979, 1981) and M.A. Jenkins (1985aJenkins ( , 1985b using the APL and Lisp languages as models. Nial retains many of the characteristics of earlier langauges which make it easy to intermix natural-language capabilities with conventional programming styles.…”