A+ is a descendent of the language "A"
created in 1988 by Arthur Whitney at Morgan Stanley.
At the time, various departments had a significant investment
in APL applications and talent, APL being a language
well-suited to the manipulation of large arrays of numbers.
As technology was moving from the mainframe to distributed
systems, there was a search for a suitable APL implementation
to run on SunOS, the distributed platform of the period.
Not happy with the systems evaluated, Arthur, motivated
by management, wrote one geared to the business: large
capacity, high performance. He was joined in his efforts
as the language took on graphics, systems' interfaces,
utility support, and an ever-widening user community.
Over the course of the next few years, as the business
began to reap tangible value from the efforts, the pieces
were shaped into a consistent whole and became A+. The
"+" referred to the electric graphical user
interface. An A+ development group was formally created
in 1992.
A+ soon became the language of choice for development
of Fixed Income applications. It offered familiarity
to the APL programmers, the advantages of an interpreter
in a fast-paced development arena and admirable floating-point
performance. A significant driver was that many of Morgan
Stanley's best and brightest were the developers and
supporters of the language. Through their practical
application of technical values, they instilled fervent
enthusiasm in talented programmers, regardless of their
programming language backgrounds.
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