[This article originally appeared in the ACM SIGAPL APL92 Conference Proceedings.]
We present the design and implementation of APL Intrinsic Functions for a Finite State Machine (also known as a Finite State Automaton) which recognizes regular languages, and a Parser which recognizes a subset of context free languages, including SLR(1), LALR(1), and LR(1). These are currently being used on a commercial APL mainframe system as part of a large real-time financial trading system, where they are part of a compiler which translates dealer specification statements into APL functions. Use of these Intrinsic Functions more than doubled the performance of the compiler.
In addition to making a significant performance improvement for a large production system, we show these functions to have value in effectively solving many common programming problems, especially those which are inherently or apparently iterative.
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