budd@mist.cs.orst.edu (Tim Budd) (02/10/88)
I might as well come out of the woodwork. The book is called ``An APL Compiler''. It is published by Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-96643-9. It should be in your bookstores any day now (It was suppose to have come out in January, but we had some problem with production - there were some cut and paste pictures that didn't get cut and pasted into the early versions, resulting in some truly awful looking APL typefaces - I was told the early version were all recalled and destroyed, but a few may have slipped through the cracks). The book describes the design and construction of a true compiler for APL. In doing this project I was mostly interested, from an academic point of view, in the type of algorithms one might construct for a language which is typeless and shapeless. Thus most of the book describes algorithms. As I was doing research, and not building a commercial system, the compiler itself is not impressive. It is big. It is batch. The input language is ascii (.io and all that horribleness). Probably the best warning comes from the Preface: ``Some readers might be interested in obtaining the code for the APL compiler. I distribute the source, subject to the usual caveats found in academically developed software; namely, that it is distributed on an as-is basis, with no guarantee of support, nor any guarantee of its suitability for any use whatsoever. As our interests were in research in code generation and not in developing a commercial quality APL system, there are some features, even some rather basic features, that one might expect to find in an APL system that are missing from our system. These are described in more detail in Appendix 1. Because of these omissions, and because we cannot afford to offer any support for a system that is undoubtedly, despite our best efforts, still buggy, the APL compiler as it stands now is potentially of only limited utility for other purposes. If, despite these warnings, individuals are still interested in obtaining the system, they can write to me at the following address for details. Tim Budd Department of Computer Science Oregon State University Corvallis, Oregon 97331 '' And, I might add, budd@cs.orst.edu. What you will get, if you enquire, is an order form for this and some other bits of software (the Bib bibliographic system, two versions of Little Smalltalk). This all on a 9-track tar tape (sorry, no other format) for roughly the cost of the tape and mailing. Currently that works out to $30. If you want you can just send a check, made out to ``oregon state university'' and indicate what it is you are ordering. oh yes, it is public domain. and yes, it is too big to post to the net. --tim budd