My name is Aaron Hsu, and I'm a computer scientist. I'm changing the way people look at computing and programming languages, what they can do with them, and how they do it.
An array that only describes a box which may contain elements, but that does not contain any elements, does not mean much. While shapes help to clarify the APL language, when doing any work, they really only describe how to arrange the elements of an array. The monadic ravel function
Arrays arrange data into a certain rectangular shape. In APL, the shape of an array is a vector --- yes, in APL, shapes are also arrays --- that describes the number and size of layout in terms of dimensions. All arrays have a shape; if A is an array then