Data Analysis Using APL2 and APL2STAT

As has often been recognized, several characteristics of APL make it especially well suited for programming statistical applications: APL treats arrays—vectors, matrices, and higher dimensional arrays—as data structures that can be processed without reference to their elements; it contains many powerful primitive functions and operators for manipulating data; and it is an extensible language, so that user-written programs are employed in the same manner as the primitives. APL2 incorporates several significant extensions of the language, the most important of which are generalized arrays—arrays whose elements may themselves be arrays. Using generalized arrays along with other features of APL2, the authors build an object-oriented programming environment for statistics and data analysis called APL2STAT.