can be implemented in far less time and with far fewer programmers than using other technology. They also may claim that because it is compact and terse, APL lends itself well to larger-scale software development and complexity, because the number of lines of code can be reduced greatly. Many APL advocates and practitioners also view standard programming languages such as COBOL and Java as being comparatively tedious. APL is often found where time-to-market is important, such as with trading systems. Terminology APL makes a clear distinction between functions and operators. Functions take arrays (variables or constants or expressions) as arguments, and return arrays as results. Operators (similar to higher-order functions) take functions or arrays as arguments, and derive related functions. For example, the sum function is derived by applying the reduction operator to the addition function. Applying the same reduction operator to the maximum function (which returns the larger of two numbers) derives a function which returns the largest of a group (vector) of numbers. In the J language, Iverson substituted the terms verb for function and adverb or conjunction for operator. APL also identifies those features built into the language, and represented by a symbol, or a fixed combination of symbols, as primitives. Most primitives are either functions or operators. Coding APL is largely a process of writing non-primitive functions and (in some versions of APL) operators. However a few primitives are considered to be neither functions nor operators, most noticeably assignment. Some words used in APL literature have meanings that differ from those in both mathematics and the generality of computer science. Syntax APL has explicit representations of functions, operators, and syntax, thus providing a basis for the clear and explicit statement of extended facilities in the language, and tools to experiment on them. Examples Hello, world This displays "Hello, world": 'Hello, world'A design theme in APL is to define default actions in some cases that would produce syntax errors in most other programming languages. The 'Hello, world' string constant above displays, because display is the default action on any expression for which no action is specified explicitly (e.g. assignment, function parameter). Exponentiation Another example of this theme is that exponentiation in APL is written as , which indicates raising 2 to the power 3 (this would be written as in some other languages and in FORTRAN and Python). Many languages use to signify multiplication, as in ,