Working with Workspaces
APL\360 wasn’t just a programming language with an interpreter. It was meant to be a self-sufficient environment, not requiring an operating system and essentially becoming an operating system itself. APL developers could not and did not assume that the host operating system, if any, provided particular abstractions, such as processes and files. That’s why APL doesn’t support files as we know them today. Instead, it stores data and commands in abstract workspaces.
A workspace is a named opaque storage of all your functions and variables. Workspaces in APL loosely correspond to screens in classical Forth. Both are used for filesystem-independent long-term storage of data and commands. In general, you don’t need to know ...
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