APL2 on Vax/4.2bsd and Apollo DN330 ?

[Neta Amit]

Looking for public domain (unlikely) or commercial implementations of APL2 for
the abovementioned machines. Nested arrays are less important to me, but I
would like to have the capability of selective access (Bracket operator),
user-defined operators, and operators with user-defined functional arguments.

I don't insist on APL -- a similar language with the ``good'' characteristics
will also do. Anybody knows where I can find *technical* description of the
language Q'Nial?

If nothing is available, I'd settle for a complete and reasonably efficient
implementation of APL, preferably with the source. Are there any products
available from STSC, Sharp, CCA, others? Please mail your comments directly
to me. If there are enough responses, I'll summarize to these news groups.

Neta Amit
csnet : amit@umn-cs
arpanet: amit%umn-cs.csnet@csnet-relay
uucp : ...inhp4!umn-cs!amit

[Lee Dickey]

> Looking for ... implementations of APL2 ...

Here are three names and address.
Each meets one or more of your criteria.
All three are, in my opinion, excellent products.

(1) Dyalog APL
Dyadic Systems Limited
30 Camp Road
Farnborough
Hampshire, England GU14 6EW
(2) STSC Unix/APL
STSC, Inc
2115 East Jefferson St
Rockville Maryland 20852
(3) Nial
Nial Systems Ltd
P.O. Box 2128
Kingston, Ont.
Canada K7L 5J8

There is another choice:
(4) the APL that comes on the distribution tape with 4.2BSD

[Jan Prins]

I've seen a number of questions in the last few weeks about APL
implementations under Unix and for the PC. Lee Dickey gave references
for several products (from Dyalog, STSC and Nial Systems). Since
I'm familiar with the STSC products, I'm adding a few details about
them here.

STSC sells two different APL implementations for small machines:

APL*PLUS PC
is an assembler implementation of APL*PLUS for the IBM PC. It comes
with a character generator ROM that adds the APL character set to
the display.

It implements everything available under the STSC timesharing system
that ran under MVT. So that's APL/360 with all the system (quad)
variables (index origin, etc.) and the "convenience" system (quad)
functions (formatter, string search, function fix/representation, etc.),
exception handling and the component file system.

It also provides access to DOS files, PC graphics and sound
generator and, mercifully, full-screen editing.


APL*PLUS UNX
is a larger C-based implementation of APL2 for a variety of Un*x-like
boxes, including the PC AT, the Vaxen and Sun.

It implements everything available under the STSC timesharing system
that runs under VM. That's VSAPL plus the system functions, exception
handling, the component file system and most of Bob Smith's original
nested arrays system (including the APL2 subset).

This system also provides access to the native file system and has
full-screen editing.


The workspace size in the PC implementation is about 480K, while the
UNX workspace depends on the size of the box it runs on.

Jan Prins {ihnp4, vax135, uw-beaver}!cornell!prins
pr...@svax.cs.cornell.edu (pr...@cornell.arpa)