IP Sharp Associates NEWSLETTER

1111111111■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■• Volume 10 /Number 6 November/December 1982 I. P. SharpAssociates NEWSLETTER In This Issue Conferences 1982 APL Users Meeting 1 APL 82 3 SHARP APL New Release of SHARP APL 4 Applications Software Crosstabulations with XTABS 7 Data Bases New Petrochemical Data Base 8 CHANGES 9 APL APL Terminology 10 Customer Application APS: A Planning System 12 Bulletin Board 1982 APL Users Meeting Atlanta, Houston, Rochester, Washington, Over 700 persons from 22 coun the following publications are Wayne 13 tries gathered in Toronto for the available: Publications 1982 APL Users Meeting in Octo An Introduction to APL for Book Ends 14 ber. Lively exchanges among at Managers ($5.00) Network News tendees and speakers on the prob An Introduction to APL for New Dial Access lems, solutions, and applications of Statisticians and Economists Numbers 15 APL highlighted this third inter ($70.00) national users' meeting. The most popular sessions were Technical Supplement 41 The use of APL is increasing. designing APL systems that are Searching, Part 4 Tl Ray Jordan, editor of APL Mar user friendly, maintainable, and Joint Representation T3 ket News, in his talk estimated efficient. These talks organized key New System Variable, there are over 100 000 persons concepts in the design of APL sys □EC TS who know some APL. Also the tems. Starting with a fundamental Workspace of the number of APL vendors has design and implementation philoso Month: 7 WSSEARCH T7 grown, from 10 in the late '60s phy, they go on to give you Drawing APL Trees: and early '70s, to 140 in 1982. specific recommendations on how Answers to Brain- The market for APL is maturing. to design APL systems that re teasers T8 From the opening session to the quire less maintenance effort and close of the meeting, users asked improve program productivity. for more information. And the These Special Technical Topics meeting aimed to do just that. The are compiled in Volume II of the three-day meeting was preceded by Proceedings ($70.00). day-long tutorials to introduce The workshops on introducing APL to actuaries, financial prof es APL, managing APL, and APL sionals, managers, statisticians and training provided an opportunity economists. From these tutorials, for panelists to share their cumu- G) ® ••••••••• ti ABC - >PET< PA03630-Y660 II ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■• CONFERENCES S omethingfor everyone lative knowledge from hands-on gether to exchange ideas and ap on managing APL. He also pre experience, and for the audience to plications. sented a paper "The PROMIS question and voice their concerns. The first night of the conference Mine Planning and Control Sys Workshop Reports ($5.00) in was highlighted by a special pre tem". At INFOGOLD, "We fore cludes the papers given by the sentation on APL animation in see an increasing role for APL be panel members plus a summary of TRON. Equipped with slides and cause of its well known advan the question-and-answer session film, Judson Rosebush, president tages: fast development, ease of from each workshop. of Digital Effects Inc., New York, maintenance, ease of change, and Not only were the days action discussed how APL was used to shorter staff training." filled, but discussions carried on animate sequences for the film If you missed the meeting, order into the evenings as well. Special TRON, as well for logo and your copy of the Proceedings. Interest Groups were held for scientific animations, and advertise Volume I ($15.00) contains the those with an interest in APL on ments. application papers plus the open microcomputers, arrays and opera John Corrie (front page), project ing and closing session papers. tors, and actuarial and insurance manager, Mining and Production Copies of all 1982 APL Users applications. A presentation on in Services, INFOGOLD, travelled Meeting publications are available house SHARP APL was given from Welkom, South Africa to from the Publications Department and a MABRA users group got to- participate in the workshop in Toronto. Left: Roger Moore (background) , I.P. Sharp Associates, Toronto, Ont. and Michael Montalbano (foreground), IBM, San Jose, Ca. "APL provides the best set of gad get-understanding and gadget controlling ideas currently availa ble. Looking to the future, it pro vides the best base for the method ology we must develop if we are ever to bring our gadget-based technology under control." Above: Adin Falkoff, IBM, York Above: Eugene McDonnell town Heights, N.Y. "Introducing (right), I.P. Sharp Associates, restrictions: don't use assignment, APL is like selling anything. Iden Palo Alto, Ca. "It's possible to use the direct definition form of tify a potential need, do the leg make a purely functional language function definition, and don't use work to find receivers, and make out of APL by adhering to these global variables." sure that APL is available." 2 I.P SHARP NEWSLETTER G) @ •••••••• 1 ti ABC - - �---_---I >PET< PA03630-Y660 [9] CONFERENCES And not all work APL82 APL Fans Flock to Heidelberg Sandra Eadie, Diisseldorf Below: Donald McIntyre, Pomona To the surprise and delight of the College, Claremont, Ca. "APL is not organizing committee, 617 persons the product of Iverson alone, or of from 23 countries attended APL Falkoff and Iverson, or indeed, of 82 in Heidelberg, West Germany, any group of living people. It is the last July. result of brilliant insight, careful Conference attendees heard thought and hard work through at many informative papers, ranging least 5000 years. Ken Iverson is from Philip Chastney's tongue-in merely the latest figure in a succes cheek proposal for a new APL en sion that includes Peano, Boole, tity,. a snark, which is a new kind Sylvester, Cayley, Newton, Leibnitz, of nothingness, to proposals to in Napier, Stevinus, Fibonacci", Diop dex infinite arrays. Enclosed ar hantus, and the unknown Egyptian, rays were also discussed in great whose work was copied by Ahmes, depth; however, the consensus the scribe. We are indeed in dis seems to be to wait and see what tinguished company. Thank you the users do with them before any Ken and Adin for your great major new changes are announced contribution." or standards agreed on. Although people often complain about the "strange" symbols used Above: "Best part of the conference in APL, APL's compactness and is meeting people and talking with freedom from the English language people, finding out how they are are seen as an advantage in non using APL, and of course, English-speaking countries. The ...finding a good restaurant." blind also consider this an advan tage, according to Waltraud Schweikhardt, who is blind. By Below: The SHARP APL graph using an extended version of ics exhibit introduced many people Braille, the programmer can read to SuPERPLOT. and write programs much more quickly than in English-based lan guages. Copies of the APL 82 Confer ence Proceedings (ACM Order No. 554820) are available from the Association for Computing Machinery. The price for ACM members is $22.00 U.S.; for non members $29.00 U.S. Place orders prepaid with: ACM Order Department P.O. Box 64145 Baltimore, Maryland 21264 NOV/DEC 1982-VOL. JONO. 6 3 ■■■■■■■■■■■■■•■■■■■■■■■■■■■ SHARPAPL New Release of SHARP APL Leslie Goldsmith, Toronto Every six months, I.P. Sharp As Aside from speeding up execu ously it was restricted to event sociates releases an updated ver tion, the use of references (or 2001 (return to immediate execu sion of SHARP APL to its own "joint representation") decreases tion). Thus you can request that timesharing system and to custom the space required to execute some the workspace be cleared if an er ers who run SHARP APL on APL expressions. First, variable ror occurs, using the trap defini their own computers. A new re assignment avoids copying the val tion O D CLEAR. When D EXIT is lease was installed on the SHARP ue being assigned wherever possi used, the system reacts by APL Service in September. In No ble. Therefore, A+B+C+-20000p' o' propagating the event up one stack vember, this release was distrib creates only one 20 000-element level and signalling the event in uted to in-house customers. array rather than three. Second, the calling function's environment. A new release represents six calling a function with variables as This "resignalled" event may be months of development work on arguments no longer makes a copy trapped by another trap expres the SHARP APL product. Typi of the named arguments. Both of sion, or possibly by the same D cally, the release may contain ex these features should improve pro trap (in which case the cutback tensions to the SHARP APL lan gramming style by eliminating the and signalling procedure is repeat guage, improvements to the per use of coding tricks to avoid dupli ed). formance of existing features, and cation of large objects in the The action codes C, D, E, N, and remedies for outstanding problems workspace. S may be used without any event or bugs. The APL product encom Introducing joint representation numbers. Eliding the event num passes more than just the lan into the interpreter substantially bers causes the trap expression to guage, so areas of enhancement modified the internal representa trap all events within the purview extend to APL software which tion of enclosed arrays. As a re of the action code. That is, when forms part of the system, to auxil sult, the overhead required to store action codes C and E are used iary processors which provide an an enclosed array is about 80 per without event numbers, they will cillary services to users, and to cent less. trap all class-0 and -1000 events; batch programs which are required More information on joint rep action code D will trap all class-0 to operate and maintain an APL resentation may be found in this and -1000 events, as well as event system but are seldom visible to issue's Technical Supplement.

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