Ferranti's girl for Ada Lovelace Day

Wednesday March 24, 2010 is Ada Lovelace Day. This means almost 1700 of us around the world made a pledge to write a blog post about a woman in science or technology.

You can see them all at Finding Ada

Or if you want to read about who I picked to write about from our array language community so straight to Ferranti's Girl for Ada Lovelace Day

And I'm collecting names of female array programmers. I've made it a game, but seriously appreciate you naming names: Women!

APL is not for programmers

Jan Karman thinks APL too good for programmers. Part 2 of his series Financial math in q has been posted online.

Rocket announces ICE

ICE from Rocket is a follow-on from IBM Info Center/Enhanced (IC/E),
with considerable enhancements compared with IBM ICE. It is a powerful
end-user system designed to let you:

Manipulate and query user data.
Write use-defined reports.
Define graphic output.
Define user-controlled data entry.
Define user-controlled data validation.
ICE allows you to make inquiries against a range of file types in the
Query System component, including large inverted files, and to produce
reports and business graphics in the Reporting System component.
ICE is an optional feature of Rocket Application System (AS) and
provides close links with APL2. It is an upgrade path for IC/E, IC/1,
ADRS and ADI users.

ICE is an excellent solution for applications which need to perform
fast queries on large volumes of data. And with AS Client Connections,
you can deliver the power of ICE to your PC.

The Query System

The Query System is designed to perform queries against ICE Query
System files. These files include:

ICE inverted Query files.
SQL/DS or DB2 tables.
DIF files.
ICE Transfer files.
ICE Application files (Reporting System store files).
APL variables created with the AS OUT (APL) command.
The result of each query is written to disk and displayed on the
user’s terminal. The user can then do any of the following:

Print the results to a destination specified in the nickname file
Perform another query
Use the TOAS or TORS command to move the data to AS, or to the
Reporting System, for further processing.
The Reporting System

Reporting System (RS) gives access to:

Report writer.
Data entry.
Data validation.
Business graphics.
and also to the following, if they have been incorporated into ICE:

Application Prototype Environment (APE).
Financial Planning System (FPS).
RS also gives access to the main ICE menu, and this gives access to
the following additional facilities:

AS
Query System
User profile
Line mode
Starter Set
Other applications
ICE and Rocket AS

ICE has been integrated as a feature of Rocket AS. It is accessed from
the Facilities menu in AS and also by command.

You can use ICE data in Rocket AS. ICE queries can be stored in AS as
Query System Command Tables and the results of a query can be used as
the current IN table. This provides seamless access to the many
facilities of Rocket AS, including:

Graphics
Reports
Project Management
Statistics
Linear Programming
Business Planning
APL and Rocket AS

You can pass information between Rocket AS and APL2, thus linking
applications in the two environments. Several utilities are available
from the USEAPL workplace in the *SAMP library.

The ability to manipulate arrays in APL2 can be used from within AS
procedures, or AS commands can be invoked from APL2 user-defined
functions. AS procedures can use APL2 matrices as an alternative to AS
data tables.

APL BUG meeting 1 April

The APL Bay Area Users' Group (The Northern California SIGAPL of the ACM) will meet on the 1st of April to hear
Paul Jackson tell about a set of classes he's developed to
provide APL functionality for the .NET programmer.

Thursday, 1 April 2010
6 p.m. - Bring takeout supper and network.
7 p.m. - Paul Jackson speaks.

at San Jose State University,
College of Engineering Room ENG 339
(E San Fernando St. & S 7th St.
San Jose, CA 95192)

http://www.sjsu.edu/about_sjsu/visiting/campus_maps/#maincampus
http://www.sjsu.edu/parking/
http://www.sjdowntownparking.com/evening_parking.html
Paul Jackson writes: The free APL I've been using is over twenty years old. In
addition to being a DOS program, it has severe limitations
on the size of variables and reading modern files would mean
mapping UTF-8 and Unicode. Years of using other development
environments has demonstrated that they have moved well
beyond what was available in the early years of APL's
success.

I've worked with VB.Net since it arrived, and I felt it had
the tools necessary to develop a compiled APL. This is not
an effort to compete with those who've learned the internals
of the .Net CLR and built a traditional interpreter.
Instead, I've produced a set of .Net classes which provide
APL functionality for the .Net programmer. It will be
provided in a way which makes writing your own functions and
operators relatively easy.

Briefly, one must declare variables as APL, but nothing more.
Dim myA As APL
myA = _Index(10)(_a.Plus, _Of(100))
myA = _Of(2, 5)(_a.Reshape, myA)
myA = _Of("ABCD")
myA = myA(_c.IndexOf, _Of("AX"))
If you step through this one line at a time, you will find
the APL value contains exactly what you would expect as an
APL programmer.

Biography:

I learned APL in 1969 while working at Trinity University in
San Antonio, Texas. I taught it there and at Dallas County
Community College District for the first twelve years of my
career. I then joined I.P. Sharp Associates, where I
developed several of their shared variable processors and
the character left argument for thorn. I eventually lead
the APL development group, before leaving in 1993.

For the last decade, I've been leading the development group
at Dialog. Dialog is a company which generalized and
formalized search engine expressions, much like APL did for
logical expressions. I retired last September, and am
enjoying the ability to work on what interests me.

LINQ to APL

LINQ is the ‘hot’ new technology for Language-Integrated Queries.

Ajay Askoolum has written how to LINQ to APL+Win.

Reference animations for J

Bob Therriault is in the process of developing some reference animations for J.

He writes on my blog:

We are hoping to create an easier conceptual access to some of J's array processing primitives. What we really would like is feedback from those with 'fresh eyes'. So if anyone has access to a classroom of learners discovering array processing languages, send them our way!

J Animations These are great, folks. Take a look.