greg@uwvax.UUCP (06/29/83)
Regarding APL's for Vaxes running Berkeley Unix, Purdue's EE department has done a lot of nice work. I sent a magtape to them to get their APL system, and here was my reaction (this is a duplicate of an article I submitted to net.lang.apl quite a while back): ------------------ A while back, there was some discussion of the Purdue APL for Unix. I work on a Vax 11/780 running Berkeley Unix 4.1-bsd, and was not satisified with the APL that they provide, so I sent to pur-ee and got a copy of their APL on a mag-tape. It is excellent. It was quite easy (trivial) to install, and is generally a polished piece of software. I would highly recommend it. The basic set of APL primitives seems complete and well-implemented. There are several quad functions, including quad-cr and quad-fx. There are no shared variables, but in their place are quad functions that allow one to call the full complement of Unix system routines (such as forking, exec'ing, pipes, file opening and closing, various forms of interruption, signaling and masking, etc.). One system call they leave out which I am thinking of installing (unless the guys at pur-ee want to) is 'ioctl'. This is a very useful system call which is part of Berkeley Unix and allows one to write programs with fine gradations of control over the terminal interface. It is great to have a quality, reliable APL available on our system. - Greg Johnson U Wis - Madison ------------------