vifl@hou2f.UUCP (M.MEKETON) (04/22/84)
Is anyone interested in setting up an exchange of APL*PLUS/PC programs? I willing to donate mine if an easy method can be worked out. For example, I have full screen numeric matrix editors for changing a matrix in a spreadsheet-like environment. Marc S. Meketon hou2f!vifl (201) 264-8297 (home)
ljdickey@watmath.UUCP (Lee Dickey) (05/02/84)
I think that sharing APL programs is a great idea.
Is anyone aware of the Workspace Interchange Standard?
--
Lee Dickey, University of Waterloo. (ljdickey@watmath.UUCP)
... {allegra, decvax} !watmath!ljdickeyljdickey@watmath.UUCP (Lee Dickey) (05/08/84)
Several people have asked me for references about the
APL Workspace Interchange Convention (WSIS).
I have compiled a short bibliography that may help:
[1] "The Workspace Interchange Standard", APL Quote Quad,
Vol. 8, No. 2, (December 1977), 25-35.
[2] "The Workspace Interchange Convention", APL Quote Quad,
Vol. 9, No. 3, (March 1979), 8-18.
[3] "Extended Character Sets and APL Workspace Interchange",
APL Quote Quad, Vol. 13, No. 2, (December 1982), 12-14.
[4] "Workspace Interchange on Microcomputers", APL Quote Quad,
Vol. 13, No. 3, (March 1983), 143-146. (The proceedings
of the Conference "APL83", held in Washington, DC.)
[5] "The ISO Workspace Interchange Convention", Annex B,
Fifth Working Draft Standard for Programming Language APL,
International Standards Organization, Document No.
ISO/DP 8485. (June, 1983). (Identical to documents ISO/97/5/6 N38
and ISO/97/5 N811. Supersedes documents ISO/97/5/6 N2, N28, N33.)
Notes:
"APL Quote Quad" may be ordered from
ACM Order Department, P.O. Box 64145
Baltimore, MD 21264, USA
The "APL standard" may be ordered from:
American National Standards Institute, Inc.
1430 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
or from
International Standards Organisation
or from
any one of a number of national standards organizations.
Countries known to be involved include Canada, France,
Great Britian, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium.
--
Lee Dickey, University of Waterloo. (ljdickey@watmath.UUCP)
... {allegra, decvax} !watmath!ljdickeylibes@nbs-amrf.UUCP (05/19/84)
I was never too involved in commercial APL usage so I don't know if
the WorkSpace Interchange Standard was ever really used. I wrote one
for VSAPL a long time ago (ask CCIS at Rutgers University) and I know
DEC had one for APLSF. I don't know anyone besides myself that ever
used the WSIS. It was good (as far as I was concerned) for storing
backups to tape. I suspect that STSC (and probably all the major
APL vendors) have it since I used their technical report when I wrote
it.
It certainly isn't applicable for transferring functions via netnews.
The way it worked was to produce a supposedly independent
representation of characters and then generate indices of the
characters (at the source code level). You would then read it in
these character independent indices and generate a site dependent APL
function. In some ways it was very complete (it could handle 17-bit
characters if thats what you had) and hence very verbose in terms of
storage requirements. In other ways it was somewhat useless - it did
not address issues like standard file access methods and hence you
almost always had to get your hands dirty when moving programs from
one vendors system to another.
I consulted for a company (many years ago) that moved all their APL
code from one APL system to another. Getting the character codes
correct was no problem. The time consuming part was recoding when we
found out subtle differences between many of the functions. Also, the
former system could execute system commands and the latter couldn't.
And you could code in assember in the former whereas you couldn't in
the latter. I learned quick that APL is not machine independent in
practice.
Don Libes {seismo,allegra}!umcp-cs!nbs-amrf!libeswatapl@watmath.UUCP (.) (05/22/84)
(1) The largest APL conversion that I know about was in LA. The Los Angeles Community College District changed from an IBM to a Honeywell in 1980. About 2200 workspaces were moved. A lot of them were CAI. Fortunately, the receiving APL was more powerful than the sending APL, in that it could execute expressions and system commands. (2) There are, apparently, several APL's that will run on the Xerox 9000 (Serius ?) machine. Someone I know uses the microcomputer version of WSIS to move workspaces from one version of APL to another by writing out a text file that has a representation of all of the functions and variables in the workspace. This is every bit as powerful as WSIS, the difference being that ordinary graphic text characters are used to encode the bit stream. (3) At the University of Waterloo there is a utility to move workspaces back and forth between the Honeywell and the IBM mainframes. It uses the WSIS. No attempt is made to detect "non-standard" programs. (5) Vanguard APL has a built in utility function that writes ISO standard WSIS files (they have an extended character set). (6) WATCOM APL has system commands "IN" and "OUT" that write Q-type CRV's. (The Q-types are exeQutable.) (7) I think that IBM APL2 also has some IN and OUT system commands. (8) Sharp APL has workspace transfer utilities that use WSIS.