Created by Arthur Whitney in 1985 to replace APL, the A programming language was intended to replace APL, but other developers at Morgan Stanley soon extended it to A+, adding a graphical user interface (GUI) and other language features, releasing the first version of A+ in 1988. Georg P. Loczewski and Britain Hamm developed A++ between 1996 and 2002.
While A+ is an extension of A, A++ is not related to either of them.
Although A is pretty much defunct, topics related to A, A+, or A++ are appropriate for this portion of our web guide.
A+ is a high-level, interactive, interpreted-array programming language designed for numerically intensive applications, particularly financial.
A+ provides an extended set of functions and operators, a GUI with automatic synchronization of widgets and variables, asynchronous execution of functions associated with variables and events, and the dynamic loading of user-compiled subroutines.
Available under a GNU General Public License, A+ is free and open-source software that runs on several variants of Unix, including Linux.
Despite the name, A++ is neither an extension or an update of A+. The name is derived from "abstraction plus reference plus synthesis," and is a minimalistic programming language built on ARS-based programming.
ARS programming is a programming paradigm built on three principles: abstraction, reference, and synthesis. These principles are a generalized form of the basic operations of the Lambda calculus. All of the essential features of a programming language can be derived from ARS, including the three major programming paradigms: functional programming, object-oriented programming, and imperative programming.
A++ was not designed as a language used to solve practical problems, but as a tool to demonstrate the core of programming, offering programming patterns that can be applied to other languages. While intended as a learning instrument, A++ can be used to write simple application programs, such as object-oriented implementations of a simple account handling and library management system. For real-world application programs, ARS++ can be used to extend A++ to a language similar to Scheme. ARS is an abstraction from the Lambda Calculus, taking its three basic operations, and giving them a more general meaning, providing a foundation for functional programming, objected-oriented programming, and imperative programming.
A++ is a tiny language, for which nearly everything is a function, while A+ represents nearly everything as arrays.
Recommended Resources
A+ Programming Language Tutorial
Published on August 4, 2022, this introductory A+ tutorial covers some of the most common topics to learn in an A+ programming language tutorial. Included is a discussion of the dependencies mechanism in A++ that allows programmers to use variables to perform operations on other variables, idioms that can be used to avoid naming conflicts, the use of functions definitions in A++, assignment commands, function calls, character sets, and an overview of the language.
https://www.programmingtutorial.org/a-programming-language-tutorial/
A+ Programming Language, The. / A++ Programming Language, The
Probably Programming is a computer programming blog that was active from 2007 to 2011, with a few posts in 2015. The author published an instructional article on the A+ programming language on July 11, 2009, and another on the A++ programming language on July 13, 2009, which was continued on July 15, 2009, all accessible from the initial article. In these articles, he introduces the languages, offers his opinions, and gives coding examples. Other languages are discussed in other articles.
http://probablyprogramming.com/2009/07/11/the-aplus-programming-language
Built on ARS, A++ is a minimalistic programming language similar to C++, with an interpreter available in Scheme, Java, C, C++, and Python. The language is sometimes used to train beginning programmers due to its minimalistic nature and enforcement of rigorous confrontation with the essentials of programming languages. It was introduced in the book entitled “A++ - The Smallest Programming Language in the World,” published in 2004. Other books about the language are featured here.
https://www.aplusplus.net/
Built on three principles: abstraction, reference, and synthesis (ARS), derived from the Lambda Calculus, a mathematical theory of computation that involves functions and can be thought of as the theoretical foundation of functional programming. It is a Turing complete language. This site introduces ARS-based programming and three tools intended to help learn and apply this approach: A++, ARS++, and ARSAPI, each of which is defined here. The site is published under the terms of the GNU License.
https://www.lambda-bound.com/
GitHub: A++ Programming Language
This is a GitHub repository created by Aryan Tripathi. It contains the source code for the A++ programming language. Created using Python, the language is still under development. A brief description of the language is provided, and brief instructions for defining a variable and solving a mathematics problem via A++ are given. Repository content and branches may be accessed by browsing or found through search and downloaded as they are or in a ZIP file.
https://github.com/MrBlueBird2/app-programming-language
