mason@utcsrgv.UUCP (Dave Mason) (04/24/84)
This is an indirect followup to an article praising STSC APL/PC.
I.P.Sharp has just lowered the price of their APL (virtually complete
emulation of their mainframe system) to about $75US for the software
and about $20US for a character generator ROM. This means that for
under $100 you can get probably the most complete APL implementation in
existence. This is clearly a *bargain*. The only problem is that it is
SLOW. This is because you effectively get the APL interpreter moved lock
stock and barrel from the S/370 to the 8088. There is a S/370 instruction
interpreter written in 8088 assembler to decode the 370 instructions. This
has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that you get the WHOLE
THING. The disadvantage is that it is slow. All the support routines
are written in C, so the screen and disk operations will be as fast as
anything else on the IBM/PC.
In discussions with some friends at IPSA, it turns out that it is mostly
formatting for output that is slow, calculations are reasonably fast.
This is because for the last 10 years some VERY GOOD programmers
have been working to make commonly occurring special cases work very
fast. This may mean that there are some cases where the Sharp system
is faster than others (although I don't know of any) who just do
everything with a straight-forward approach. Anyone who has Sharp and
another might try some things like and.or matrix products, dyadic iota.
They also have programs to move programs between a mainframe and an IBM/PC,
so if your company or institution uses Sharp APL, getting this could be
very convenient.
Enough...for the record I neither work for or hold stock in IPSA, I just think
this is a great opportunity.
--
Usenet: {dalcs dciem garfield musocs qucis sask titan trigraph ubc-vision
utzoo watmath allegra cornell decvax decwrl ihnp4 uw-beaver}
!utcsrgv!mason Dave Mason, U. Toronto CSRG
CSNET: mason@Toronto
ARPA: mason%Toronto@CSNet-Relay