SECRIST%OAK.SAINET.MFENET@lll-mfe.arpa (01/02/86)
Date: Thu, 2-JAN-1986 01:38 EST To: Info-Micro@brl-vgr.arpa Message-ID: <[OAK.SAINET.MFENET].5F95D460.008E867A.SECRIST> Organization: Science Applications Int'l. Corp., Oak Ridge, Tenn. Geographic-Location: 36 01' 42" N, 84 14' 14" W CompuServe-ID: [71636,52] X-VMS-Mail-To: ARPA%"Info-Micro@brl-vgr.arpa" Here are some promised references on APL: The BYTE APL interpreter I mentioned earlier in "The BYTE Book of PASCAL" apparently didn't make it into the pages of BYTE. The article, "An APL Interpreter in Pascal", appears with full PASCAL source in the book mentioned above, which was published in 1979 by BYTE books (Blaise W. Liffick, editor; Library of Congress # QA 76.73.P2B18; Authors: Alan Kaniss, Vincent Di- Christofano, and John Santini). I haven't seen it in a book store in ages, so you might call BYTE (603/924-9281) or a local library. The article describes a small APL interpreter implemented on a CDC 6600 which uses the upper and lower case ASCII character set as unique symbols (i.e. no special char set req'd). The authors think it would be fairly portable. The articles that the above implementation was based upon, however, were published as "An APL Interpreter for Microcomputers" in the Aug., Sept., and Oct. 1977 issues of BYTE. These articles sound like the pseudo-code used for the PASCAL implementation above, based on what I saw in the PASCAL article at a quick-glance. On the commerical side, a vendor called STSC purports to have several products out that, to quote an ad in the current BYTE (Jan. '86, pg. 93) cover a range "from our UNIX version to the new streamlined Pocket APL". The latter, 'Pocket APL', is for an IBM-PC. I remember that someone I spoke to who actually had the product thought it was fun to play with and seemed fairly robust, but that wasn't good for "real work" because it only had a 64K task size (sigh... remember when 64K used to be the world ?!). Much beyond "pocket" got pretty pricey, though - their full "APL*PLUS PC" is $595. For info: 800/592-0050, in Maryland 301/984-5123. An APL-based laptop is now out called the WS-1 from Ampere, Inc. (see pg. 345 in the Jan. '86 Byte). I'd like to hear from anyone who runs across any PD or relatively inexpensive implementations (n < $75), particularly for CP/M-80, the Apple //, or the C-64. Richard SECRIST%OAK.SAInet.MFEnet@LLL-MFE.Arpa --- Disclaimer: I have no commerical interests in any of the above products.