APL\11 source now available
L.J. Dickey
distribution. There is a license, and there are conditions, but it is
free. This comes to us thanks to the efforts of Michael Cain
<mc...@advtech.uswest.com>, of U S WEST Advanced Technologies, who
managed to wheedle and cajole the right people. This interpreter is
well known. It started life as the brain child of Ken Thompson at Bell
Laboratories, and the work was carried on by John Bruner and Anthony
Reeves, graduate student and supervisor, who were then both at Purdue
University. Since that time the program was distributed mainly by
Berkeley Distribution Systems (BDS), but fixes and upgrades seemed
never to make their way onto the master tape, and so never got
updated. There is some fine work cone by Ken Yap that I would like to
see make its way into this code. Ken removed some byte order
dependencies, cleaned up the code a lot, and fixed some bugs. (One
horrendous Bug Ken fixed was the one that produced wrong answers for
-\1 2 3.)
Look in the directory languages/apl/apl.11 on the machine
watserv1.uwaterloo.ca.
Lee Dickey
--
Prof. Leroy J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, U of Waterloo, Canada N2L 3G1
Internet: ljdi...@math.UWaterloo.ca
ljdi...@math.waterloo.edu
UUCP: ljdi...@watmath.UUCP
Emmett McLean
was once installed on the VAX ULTRIX used at SF State. But no documentation
was available on how to construct the glyphs. I gathered from a posting
on comp.lang.apl that one needed a site license to get the documentation.
So I submitted a request the university administrator who handles these
things (fbue...@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu) and encouraged her to request the
documentation. She was very positive about it. She followed up by
calling Digital. As no one answered she left a message on an answering
devise but no one got back to her. After trying a second time she
eventually gave up on looking into it.
Knowing this, I asked if it would be ok for me to contact Digital on my own
and persist with a request for information. Our administrators said great!
I called Digital's 800 number and left my name number with a sales rep and
left all the information I could muster about APL from our ULTRIX document-
ation. But similarly no one got back to me. I also called the APL number
in the APL faq, got no answer, left a message, and nothing happened. Called
again dito.
As we don't have any science instructors with an interest in APL the whole issue
is moot. Anyway, is there some product number one can refer to regarding
APL/11 inquiries ?
Emmett
John R. Levine
>The source code for the APL\11 interpreter is now available for
>It started life as the brain child of Ken Thompson at Bell
>Laboratories, and the work was carried on by John Bruner and Anthony
>Reeves, graduate student and supervisor, who were then both at Purdue
>University.
Oh, wow. Ken originally wrote the APL interpreter as a weekend hack.
When I was at Yale in about 1976, I dropped by the labs one day and got a
copy of it on a tape (a DECtape, as I recall) and put in some improvements
to make it useful, like workspace load and save and support for the APL
character sets on the terminals we were using. I also added circle-quad
to do graphical output on the early bitmap GEM terminals we had. This
took about 3 days. I added the A P L \ 1 1 banner as a lark, so it would
look a little more like APL\360.
Some of the undergraduates threw in a few more featurettes, most notably
support for different keyboards and character sets without changing all
the code and a primitive function editor. (In Ken's version, functions
were read from files and you could shell out to ed to edit them.) Then I
sent it in to usenix, and it went out on the first or second usenix tape,
which is where I presume the Purdue people got it.
Since I never expected it to be around this long, I didn't go to much
effort to make it clear who had done what. But you can tell that I
added the workspace support. The magic number for APL\11 workspaces is
octal 100554 because my birthday (in decimal) is 10 May 54.
Regards,
John Levine, jo...@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl