Does APL really need run‐time parsing?

Abstract Most APL systems delay all parsing until run‐time. Because the APL expression language is inherently ambiguous and because identifier binding is delayed until run‐time, some runtime parsing is shown to be necessary. Nevertheless we argue that most APL statement parsing can be done at entry‐time and that there are several reasons for doing so. Then a technique is described whereby APL statements are partially parsed at entry‐time and are parse completed at run‐time.