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