[net.lang.apl] Purdue APL

ljdickey@watmath.UUCP (Lee Dickey) (07/06/83)

How does one get 'Purdue APL'?

reid@decwrl.UUCP (Brian Reid) (06/12/84)

-------
I have a large base of software in ucsfcgl APL, 4.1, and I've just started
looking at Purdue 4.2 APL to see about converting to it. To my horror I
discovered that Purdue APL deals only in overstruck characters or real APL
characters. Having spent the last 10 years using various APL systems on
3 different computers in which rho was .rh and iota was .io and quad was
.qd, I'm quite reluctant to switch to a scheme in which quad is L <bs> \
and lamp is J <bs> C. Backspacing and overprint just looks funny on my
CRT.

Purdue supplies some screwy editor called XED, which I assume offers some
way of editing overstruck characters on a CRT. I don't want to use XED,
I want to use emacs.

I'm preparing to solve this problem by some combination of an emacs special 
mode, pre- and post-processor programs to do the conversion in and out of
emacs, or even modification to the character translation tables of apl.
Before I get started, I'd like to know if anybody else out there has faced
this problem and if so, how they decided to solve it.

	Brian Reid
	Stanford University and DEC Western Research
		..ucbvax!Shasta!reid
		..decwrl!glacier!reid
		reid@su-glacier.arpa