STEIN@UCONNVM.BITNET (Alan Stein) (07/09/89)
I'd like to be able to access APL on the IBM 3090 system I'm connected to. Has anyone been able to do that? I can think of two obvious possibilities, but the people I've contacted at our computer center don't know about either. One would be to substitute mneumonics for the APL symbols, which I know can be done with some VAX systems, and the other would be to have some sort of APL terminal emulation software. The IIGS desktop would be a natural for that. Alan H. Stein | stein@uconnvm.bitnet Department of Mathematics | stein%uconnvm.bitnet@mitvma.mit.edu University of Connecticut | ...psuvax1!UCONNVM.BITNET!STEIN 32 Hillside Avenue | Waterbury, CT 06710 | Compu$erve 71545,1500 (203) 757-1231 | GEnie ah.stein
secrist@msdsws.enet.dec.com ("Richard C. Secrist") (07/12/89)
APL terminals use ^N and ^O or whatever to shift-in and out of an alternate character set -- it's the same technique used by ANSI terminals to shift in and out of the line drawing character set. The trick is to have that character set hanging around. If you have a DEC VT-2xx or VT-3xx emulator for your Apple of whatever flavor, you can download an APL character set into the Apple and run with that -- this is supported by things like DEC's VAX APL under VMS. Two build-it-yourself approaches are to 1) use the Applesoft Programmer's Toolkit originally from the dawn of DOS 3.3 to grow your own character set, which mapped your stuff into the hires screen, or 2) build your own character set under the Apple PASCAL system. Neither of these are any fun, and wouldn't be speed deamons, but they'd work. That or any powerful graphics language like GraFORTH or something. Someone did one of these for the Commodore-64 that worked pretty well and put it up on CompuServe. Even with that done though you're short the keycaps, and so you have to go through life with this little chart next to you. Not fun. Many APLs become ASCIIable by letting you use "dot command mode" to fake APL, which works very well, although it ruins the terseness of APL, e.g. .RHO, .IOTA, or something like that. I dunno about the blue flavors of APL, though. You can get native APLs for the Amiga and PC, the most notable being from STSC, but I don't believe they ever put a product out on a 'gs, and certianly not on a ][-class box. Hope that helps. rcs