jph@suns.UMD.EDU (J. Patrick Harrington) (12/11/89)
After asking this group about any low-cost APL that would run under UNIX on a Sun workstation, I received several helpful replies outlining what is available - thanks to all of you. The only *free* APL available right now seems to be APL\11, for which I was directed by L.J. Dickey to Ken Yap at Rochester. Ken was kind enough to make the source available as an anonymous ftp (after I faxed him a copy of our Unix source license - it is not public domain, as the code is a modification of one contained on the Berkeley distribution tape). Ken said that these sources last worked under Suns (3.4), and made no promises about 4.0.3. I found that they would compile under 3.5 and 4.0.3, but the 4.0.3 binary crashed, and I haven't messed further with it. I have been running the other binary (compiled under 3.5) under 4.0.3. It is certainly worth having, as there is an "apltool" (due to Ken, I gather) that provides all the characters in a window environment, although when entering the overstrikes you only see the last character. It is fun to play with, and I now always keep the window as an icon to be used as a calculator - a workspace with all the physical and astronomical constants I frequently use makes it ideal for quick computations. APL\11 has problems, though. Seems prone to self-destruct when you make serious errors. But the worst problem I have encountered is that the domino function is hoplessly broken - it returns wrong and even *non-numeric* characters when operating on even a simple 3 X 3 matrix. The source code (a8.c ?) looks fearsome to me, so I wonder if anyone out there has been running this old code, and if so, can anyone give me a clue about fixing this important function? Or even user-defined inversion function composed of other primitives? J. Patrick Harrington jph@astro.umd.edu