[amibroker] A computer science related question on the AFL Language

["cascade3891" <cascade3891@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Amibroker community,

I have specific questions about the AFL language, regarding where it stands within the computer language spectrum(s) and what effect that has on speed/performance, agility and modularity as well as its accuracy for readability and unit testing purposes. 

I know that AFL is not an object oriented programming language for the main part (however it does have some OO features like COM), does this make AFL primarily a functional programming language, a bit like OCaml?? 

Are functional programming languages better for financial trading applications? Where there is a need for speed, and quality stable code?
AFL seems a lot brief in terms of the amount of code that you have to write (terse) ... this makes it more attractive for reading over and checking the code, and for backtesting purposes. 

I notice also that with AFL you don't have to declare data types, again making it much more efficient. 

Is there a drawback to using an OO code for financial trading systems/applications?

I quite like the speed and terseness of the AFL language actually, and also since it has many similarities to C. But would there be any limitations to not being able to define classes and objects? 

I'm not an experience programmer so sorry if I sound green. 

Anyone have any ideas on Tomasz' original design philosophy when he set out creating the AFL language? to me it seems like he wanted to keep the power and similarities to C/C++ given the similar syntactical structure, whether because he knows that language well, or because he wanted it to be able to have the same sort of power, but he also seems to have kept in mind the needs for performance and stability, terseness for backtesting/speed purposes, and maybe also b/c most traders need to pick up the language, hence trying to make AFL easier to grasp. 











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