slc@hoptoad.uucp (Steve Costa) (06/10/90)
In article <21499@estelle.udel.EDU> new@ee.udel.edu (Darren New) writes: >In article <11455@hoptoad.uucp> slc@hoptoad.UUCP (Steve Costa) writes: >> I wanted to be able to track things better, so I wrote some APL programs >> to pull apart the SAVEDGAME file and print statistics on generals. > >Do you have APL on the Amiga? Where did you get it? Is it any good? >Fast? Good system interface? Tell me more! -- Darren APL.68000 is available for several machines, including Amiga, Mac, & ST. You can get it from: Spencer Organization Inc. P.O. Box 248 Westwood NJ 07675 Phone: (201) 666-6011 It's a reasonable implementation of standard APL with a component-based file system and some helpful system functions (e.g. string search). It's reasonably fast; I use it for some CPU intensive geographic map generation (lots of trig) and it completes in a reasonable time. It's interface to Amiga features is somewhat limited; it's hard to reach outside the Amiga environment (except for native Amiga files). There's supposed to be a way of including non-APL code in your workspaces, but it's not documented. If and when they produce a new version, which they've been vaporing about for a long time, I would hope they would improve access to the rest of the operating system. At the least they should put AREXX in. I'd like them to follow the model of STSC's APL II for 80386-based machines. That has a very high level of configurability; but it also lists for about $1500, compared to about $100 for APL.6800. Overall it's a good tool, but not something I would want to distribute a product in. The only commercial package I have seen is an income tax preparation program; I'm not even sure it's still available.