A commentary on the formulator

Out now on Vector: Neville Holmes elaborates on his scheme for a commodity calculator

No stinking loops

Out now on Vector: Stevan Apter, one of the programmers Jeffry Borror refers to as “the q gods”, kicks off his new column No Stinking Loops with “Treetable: a case study in q”

Out now on Vector

Six new articles posted:

The view from Berlin Roving reporter Mike Hughes sends us a postcard from APL2010. Devon McCormick shares his notes with us. Graeme Robertson offers a personal view. Vibeke Ulmann tells us what she liked best.

Chairman’s report 2010 BAA chairman Paul Grosvenor reviews the year.

Remembering Eugene McDonnell Roger Hui celebrates the late APL pioneer and Vector columnist

Vector 24, Nos 2 & 3

Vector 24, Nos 2&3, a bumper double issue, is in the post to subscribers.

APL2000 announces APL+Win 10

Version 10 provides more speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays enabling a whole new level of performance

Rockville, MD – September 13, 2010 --- APLNow LLC announced today the release of APL+WIN Version 10. This latest version of their popular APL+WIN product, an implementation of the APL application programming language product for the Windows platform, offers breakthrough performance improvements through faster overall execution speed, support for larger workspaces and larger arrays. Additional enhancements included in this version enable multi-thread processing, provide an application recovery tool and enhance the error handling and debugging processes.

Highlights of APL+WIN V10 include:
• Scalar and array operations run 30% to 50% faster
• Workspaces as large as 2.6 GB on 32 bit PCs and 3.6 GB on 64-bit PCs
• Support for a 10-fold increase in array size
• New APLSupervisor enabling concurrent execution on multi-core machines
• New and enhanced error handling, debugging facility and control structures

For information: www.apl2000.com
Contact: Sonia Beekman at sales@apl2000.com
Phone: 301-208-7150

First contact!

Morten Kromberg and Roger Hui duke it out in cyberspace in this sci-fi epic

How the mathematicians won the war

Keith Smillie pits J and his wits against he famous cipher machine in Simulating the Enigma. Online now.

The Year 1998

Neville Holmes concludes his series “Functional calculation in J” with The Year 1998. Online now.

Winners of Dyalog 2010 programming contest

Dyalog has announced the winners of its 2010 programming contest: Ryan Tarpine from Browns University, (USA), Mstislav Elagin from Humboldt University (Germany) and Joel Hough from Salt Lake Community College (USA). A Special Effort award was made to Alexander Ivanov from the Moscow Institute for Physical Research (Russia).

Ryan Tarpine will be at the APL2010 conference in Berlin.

Eugene McDonnell 1926-2010

Eugene McDonnell, computer science pioneer has passed away. For many years he wrote the Vector column “At Play With J” recently collected and published by Vector Books.

Gene McDonnell died yesterday evening at home. Friends and family members were gathered, reminiscing, when Gene’s caretaker (since a stroke last week left him unconscious) came into the room to say “I think he’s passing.” And so it was.

Gene was a family man, utterly decent, generous, kindhearted; also erudite and witty. His contributions to APL were graceful as well as useful. I’m so grateful to have known and worked with him.

The McDonnell family is planning a memorial gathering at home, Sunday August 29. Jeanne can be reached at 1509 Portola, Palo Alto, 94306; phone 650 321-5260.

[Larry Breed]

Eugene McDonnell died peacefully at home in Palo Alto in the evening of August 17, surrounded by family and friends. All of us in the APL world owe him a debt for his pioneering work in APL.

I recently had the honor of writing the preface to Eugene’s “At Work and Play with J” (a collaborative editing effort of the J community and a work of which Eugene was very proud). I reproduce it here because it gives a sense of the man and his work.

In my youth, when I was just starting in APL, on receiving an issue of the APL Quote-Quad I would inevitably and eagerly first turn to Eugene McDonnell’s “Recreational APL” column. Through these columns I learned that it was possible for technical writing to be erudite, educational, and entertaining, and through them I learned a lot of APL.

Thus it was with Eugene’s “At Play with J” articles in Vector. In topics ranging from primes to permutations to pyramids to pi, with a cast of characters that included Apter, Black, and Crelle, Jacob and Josephus, Blanda and Montana and Taylor, and Scholes, the articles offered up the “smoother pebbles” and “prettier shells” found while playing on the seashore bordering the great ocean of knowledge. And we are all beneficiaries of this play.

I am pleased that Vector is publishing the collection of At Play With J as a book. I look forward to being educated and entertained once more.

[Roger Hui]

Ken Iverson’s blackboard from his days at IPSA

From Peter Wooster at the group APL – A Programming Language at LinkedIn.com:

This blackboard was in Ken's office the '80s at IPSA. After that it was in Bob Bernecky's office and Tony Bailey's, I'm not sure if Benoit Paquin had if for a while or not. After the separation of Soliton, I inherited it and removed Tony's batman stickers and kept it in my office at Reuters until they eventually shut us down. The blackboard is on a wall in my studio and will remain there unless someone else wants it. It has plenty of chalk and a couple of erasers. It's still in excellent condition.

If you can come to Oakville and pick it up, it's yours.

Embedding APL fonts in web pages

Kai Jaeger was bowled over to see the FinnAPL Idiom Library displayed correctly on my iPhone – and using the elegant APL385 Unicode font.

His article on how to embed APL fonts in web documents is online now.

Dyalog in Toronto 29 July

APL Borealis and Dyalog Ltd are pleased to present:

TWO APL EVENTS in one day! - featuring DYALOG APL - July 29, downtown Toronto:

APL & Excel Integration - a morning mini-workshop on the key components of using APL & Excel together for application development. (9am to noon, includes a take-home toolkit*) Details

Dialogue with Dyalog – a full afternoon of presentations – with Morten Kromberg & Daniel Baronet – who will bring you up to date on all the latest features of Dyalog APL – learn how it can power your business applications. (1:00 to 5:30pm) Details

Location: Learning Tree Intl, 1 Dundas Street W., 10th Floor, Toronto (Yonge & Dundas)
Date: Thursday, 29 July

RSVP essential

Space is limited – please contact us to register for either of these events as soon as possible.

RSVP or further info:
Richard Procter, APL Borealis, tel: 1-866-888-6377
Brian Oliver, APL Borealis, tel: 416-488-7828
email: info@aplborealis.com

Java vs K

Google engineer Michael Schidlowsky has posted a screencast at New York University comparing the Java and K programming languages. (Kudos to Stevan Apter.)

News from Dyalog

Dyalog has posted its summer newsletter.

APL2010 programme published

APL2010 has published its programme.

BAPLA09 presentations online

Presentations from the BAPLA09 conference in Reading have been posted online.

STAC releases new market data benchmark with results from Kx and Oracle

The Securities Technology Analysis Center (STAC®) today released STAC-M3TM Benchmark results for a solution from Kx Systems and Oracle Corporation. STAC-M3 provides a common measuring methodology for solutions that manage large timeseries datasets (tick databases). The measurement standard is currently a community proposal developed by the STAC Benchmark Council, comprised of trading organizations and vendors. The Council defines a series of standard benchmarks for capital market workloads, though interestingly only trading organizations - and not vendors - can approve specific tests, which ensures the benchmarks have relevance to real-world trading demands. To complete the inaugural benchmark testing on timeseries data, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) worked with Kx Systems, using Kx’s kdb+. The results have now set the standard for a series of benchmark tests to be carried out over the next few months.

The ability to quickly analyze timeseries of price and trade data is crucial for firms which trade financial instruments such as stocks, currencies, options and other derivatives. The growth of high-frequency trading makes it important for firms to rapidly store, retrieve and analyze massive quantities of data in order to back-test new trading algorithms, monitor their risk, and satisfy regulatory demands. At the same time, surging data volumes brought about by computerized trading make these tasks increasingly challenging in markets which can ‘tick’ (publish changes to prices) millions of times per second.

Peter Lankford, founder & director of STAC, said: "We're pleased that Kx and Oracle have taken the lead in publishing STAC-M3 Benchmarks. This testing responds to a direct need for performance data expressed by some of the world's leading financial institutions. We look forward to further benchmark results from Kx and Oracle, as well as other vendors of software and hardware that can be used for managing large timeseries of data.”

Simon Garland, Kx chief strategist, said: “We have worked closely with STAC and Oracle to create benchmarks. Going forward, the benchmarks will give financial institutions clearly defined criteria for measuring the performance of their systems. When setting up large, critical databases people need to be sure that the configuration they use is delivering the best possible performance within their hardware and software constraints. The problem is nobody has the time and resources to do an in-depth evaluation of all the alternatives and ideally to regularly revisit the chosen solution. These new benchmarks from STAC are valuable components of these decisions."

This series of tests is designed to set a standard for future benchmarks to be carried out by STAC in conjunction with various vendors. The results are vital for financial institutions needing to address their CEP requirements, facing the pressures of constantly increasing data volumes and regulatory demands. The STAC-M3 Benchmark suite is the first benchmark standard for market data timeseries (tick) databases, allowing vendors to measure their performance and financial institutions to test their own systems.

The STAC-M3 Benchmark standards will accelerate market selection of new technologies by enabling user firms and vendors to measure the performance of their database solutions in a common way. Trading firms will be able to quickly assess the benefit of innovations at all layers of the tick-database ‘stack’ including application software, operating systems, processors, servers, and storage architectures.

Amir Halfon, Oracle’s senior director of financial services technology, added: “Oracle’s unique storage server, the Sun Fire X4540, allowed us to achieve extreme performance with Kx by placing the data as close to the CPUs as possible. The Sun Fire X4540 provides fast, high throughput access between the threads of execution and the storage subsystem, offering up to 96TB of storage in a compact, cost-effective package. The tight integration between compute and storage within the Sun Fire X4540 eliminates the need for an external SAN and provides an ideal platform for high-performance analytics solutions such as Kx kdb+.”

The STAC-verified benchmarks were carried out using Kx kdb+ v2.6 on the Oracle Sun Fire X4540 storage server using version 0.92 of the STAC-M3 Benchmark specifications. STAC-M3 v0.92 has been submitted to the full Council for ratification, and a vote is pending.

The benchmark report is available at www.STACresearch.com/kx.

News from Kx Systems

New kdb+ version
Within the next few weeks, Kx will release v2.7, a significant update to kdb+, which includes file compression. A beta version is already available to licensed users at kxdownloads.com.

Reuters feed handler
Another major enhancement to kdb+ is a new library which enables access to RMDS (Reuters Market Data System) market data, versions 5 and 6. This is for licensed kdb+tick users, and is an almost drop-in replacement for the classical SSL library previously provided by Kx.

Computerworld Honor Award 2010
Kx was nominated as a Laureate by Morgan Stanley, as an innovative technology company. We attended the Medal Ceremony and Gala Awards Dinner in Washington on 7th June. Photos can be seen at the Computerworld Honors Program 2010 website. Read more about it.

Kx customer receptions
We regret that we were forced to cancel the Kx London Customer Reception and Workshop this year due to the volcanic ash clouds. We consider face to face time with you essential, and are planning meetings in London and New York over the next few months. Please contact us if you would like us to visit your firm.

Kx in Asia
In January 2010 we participated in TradeTech China, where Head of Kx Asia, Chris Burke, was one of the technology panelists discussing how to leverage the latest technology solutions and trading platforms to enhance profitability and efficiency.

We will be exhibiting at Trading Architecture Asia, Hong Kong, 1-2 September 2010. Please visit our booth - we look forward to seeing you and your colleagues. Read more.

We are planning a technical meeting in Singapore in the first week of October, with Charlie Skelton, Kx Chief Technology Officer. Please contact us for more details.

Kx in the media
Kx customers rated us highly in Aite Group’s report, “Quant Strategy Development Playgrounds: The High Performance Database Sandbox” Read more. Simon Garland, Kx Chief Strategist, is quoted in Securities Industry News in an article: “Algos Take Hold in Fixed-Income Markets”. We have also received media coverage in Market Data Insight, Asia Etrading, and Bobsguide.com among others.

Updated material on Kx.com
Please see the 2010 versions of the FAQ and White Paper.

For more information about Kx and its products
Email us at info@kx.com with any questions or requests for information.

First Derivatives announces kdb+ training courses

My name is Nathan Perrem and I am the head kdb+ trainer at First Derivatives. I will be hosting public kdb+ training in New York and London on the following dates in June/July 2010:

New York
21st, 22nd, 23rd June: q Fundamentals
24th, 25th, 28th June: q for gods
29th, 30th June, 1st July: q for DBAs

London
5th, 6th, 7th July: q Fundamentals
8th, 9th, 12th July: q for gods
13th, 14th, 15th July: q for DBAs

See the syllabus for these courses, and the dates for all remaining public courses in 2010.

We also provide customized on-site training for clients.

For further information on our training courses please contact me.

Kind Regards,
Nathan Perrem

Nathan Perrem
Kdb+ Trainer/Consultant
First Derivatives plc
(m) 917-453-0008
nperrem@firstderivatives.com

Film Synopsis

Are you curious about why I have put my entire life on hold to make a film about the APL array language family?

This is WHY:

Film Synopsis

Direct Development: its time at last?

Public spending in Britain is under harsher and harsher scrutiny. Time at last for lightweight development?

Rosetta Challenge tasks added to the 2010 Dyalog Programming Contest

In response to feedback suggesting that the suite of tasks in the 2010 Dyalog Programming Contest appears to be a little more comprehensive than many students have time for at this busy part of the academic year, we have decided to add a ‘Rosetta Code Challenge’ to the 2010 Programming Contest, which will run in parallel with the main programming competition. Six weeks remain until the submission deadline on July 18th.

Rosettacode.org is a site which presents solutions to the same (nearly 400) tasks in as many different programming languages as possible. At this time, a relatively small number of solutions have been posted in APL, so we are keen to encourage APL users to submit more APL solutions. To this end, we are offering a USD 250 prize for the best solution to each of the following five (fun!) problems selected from rosettacode.org:

1. Animate a pendulum
2. Knapsack problem
3. Happy numbers
4. Hofstadter-Conway sequence
5. Monty Hall problem

See the Rosetta Code Challenge page for more details on how to participate. The terms and conditions of the main programming competition are not affected by the Rosetta Code Challenge, with the exception that anyone who submits solutions for two or more tasks in EITHER competition will participate in the drawing for the 20 consolation prizes worth USD 100 each.

As is the case for the main Dyalog Programming Contest, you can win the same amount of prize money by referring a winner to the competition as you can by actually participating. While prize winners must be eligible for an Educational License for Dyalog APL, anyone can win referral awards! Be the person who refers the winners for all five Rosetta Challenge tasks and you could win USD 1,250!

Best Regards,

Morten Kromberg
CTO, Dyalog Ltd

Annual General Meeting 2010

The minutes of the 2010 Annual General Meeting of the British APL Association are online.

Mastering Dyalog APL

Dyalog has published Bernard Legrand’s compendious Mastering Dyalog APL, probably the best modern introduction to APL available. Buy all 796 pages of it from Amazon, or download it free of charge from its companion site.

Wasted on the boards

Howard Peelle continues calculating his way through backgammon. New article.

Richard Lathwell confesses

My father mentions that he taught Benoit Mandelbrot APL

Dyalog announces 2010 conference

This year, Dyalog is holding it's annual User Conference as part of the global APL2010 conference organised by APL-Club Germany. This provides us with an opportunity to meet with users of other APL systems, and other "array languages" like J and K. With luck, it will be the largest gathering of array language users for some time!

You can contribute by submitting refereed papers and other contributions in response to the APL2010 Call for papers (see http://www.apl2010.de for more details). The first hard deadline for submissions is on May 15th, where you need to provide a one page abstract.

Dyalog intends to submit 5 or 6 papers on recent R&D work to the main conference in this fashion. We expect to be talking about recent and upcoming features of Dyalog products, such as:

- Designing a new APL System for the Microsoft.Net platform (APL#)
- Support for 128-bit Decimal Floating Point Data
- Abolishing "FILE DAMAGED" using Component File Journaling
- Parallel Processing using PEACH and PRANK
- Cross-Platform APL Keyboard support
- Support for Regular Expressions in Dyalog APL

We will also have a number of things to demonstrate and talk about that won't be ready to write about in the context of the refereed part of the conference. We'll cover these in our own streams which will run in parallel (but co-ordinated) with the main APL2010 streams. We also invite you to contribute to these streams - please write to conference@dyalog.com if you would like to present something at the conference but prefer to do it "as part of the Dyalog Conference".

As usual, we are very keen to hear from our users regarding problems solved (or still unresolved), using Dyalog APL. In particular, we are interested in hearing from users who can share experiences with features recently added to Dyalog APL, such as:

- Unicode and 64-bit Migrations
- Object Orientated Programming
- Web Servers, Web Services, Encryption and Secure Communications
- Source Code Management
- Using the Microsoft.Net Framework

If you have recent work that you are willing to share, please let us know.

Finally, we will be running workshops and training courses during the conference. We will probably have a bit less time available for these than we set aside in a normal Dyalog Conference, so we are very keen to get some input on courses or workshops that you would like to see. Again, please write to conference@dyalog.com with your suggestions.

We hope that you will participate in making the event a success, either by attending or contributing "content" to the conference - and that we will see many of you in Berlin in September!

Regards,

Morten Kromberg
Dyalog Ltd.

APL2000 2010 Users Conference in Washington DC

Hey folks,

Read about Sonia Beekman’s prize!

I’ll post the photos when I get home from Toronto next week! Stay tuned!

Report: Finnish Forest Seminar 2010

Despite the volcano, Adrian Smith made it to Finland for the 2010 Finnish Forest Seminar, and posted this report.

Dyalog announces 2010 programming competition

Following on from last years successful contest, the 2010 edition of the Dyalog Programming Contest was launched last week.

The contest has been established with the purpose of encouraging students, and others, to investigate APL.

Last year, we estimate that roughly 300 students downloaded an educational copy of Dyalog APL as a result of hearing about the contest. A young man named Ronald Chan won USD 2,000 plus an all-expenses paid trip from New Zealand to Princeton, New Jersey for our annual conference. 35 other participants won cash prizes, including people who did not submit programs but introduced the people who did.

You can read about the results of last year's contest at:

http://www.dyalog.com/news.htm#contest

... and watch a few minutes of the prize ceremony at:

http://video.dyalog.com/Dyalog09/2009ProgrammingContestPrizeCeremony.html

This year, the contest is sponsored by Fiserv (US), Simcorp (Denmark), APL Italiana (Italy) and Dyalog Ltd. as well as several individuals and companies who have chosen to remain anonymous. There are 26 cash prizes to be won by students with an equivalent number of introduction awards - totalling US$ 15,000 (up from 11,000 last year).

The First Prize winner can look forward to $2,500 plus round trip travel from anywhere in the world to the APL 2010 Conference in Berlin Germany on September 13-16.

As before, the people or organisations that introduce the winning students to the contest will receive the same dollar prizes - and they need not be students to make the introduction.

The deadline for submission is Noon UTC, July 18th, 2010.

For more information on the programming contest, rules and submission of entries, see http://www.dyalog.com/contest_2010, and/or join the Facebook group "Dyalog Programming Contest".

We hope that you will support the contest this year, either by participating (if you should be lucky enough to qualify) or by passing this information on to a student who might be interested!

Morten Kromberg,
CTO, Dyalog Ltd.

BAA announces 2010 Annual General Meeting

The British APL Association will hold its Annual General Meeting at 3pm on Fri 21 May at The Albion, 2-3 New Bridge Street, London EC4V 6AA.

Agenda

• Minutes of AGM 2009
• Report from the Chairman (Paul Grosvenor)
• Report from the Treasurer (Nicholas Small) (including report from membership secretary)
• Committee for 2010-2011
• Appointment of Auditor
• Questions
• Presentation of the Outstanding Achievement Award
• Any other business (at least 24 hours notice, please.)

The AGM will be brief and will be followed by an ordinary meeting with invited speakers from Dyalog and MicroAPL. Tea, coffee and a light buffet will be provided

Anthony Camacho, Hon Sec

If you hope to attend, please notify treasurer@vector.org.uk.

The Albion is on the west side of New Bridge Street, just south of Ludgate Circus, the junction of New Bridge Street, Fleet Street, Farringdon Street, and Ludgate Hill. NB: Blackfriars underground station is closed until 2011.

DLS 2010 call for papers

Dynamic Languages Symposium 2010

October 18, 2010

Co-located with SPLASH (OOPSLA) 2010

In cooperation with ACM SIGPLAN

John Ascuaga's Nugget, Reno/Tahoe, Nevada, USA

http://www.dynamic-languages-symposium.org/dls-10/

Call for papers

The 6th Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) at the conference formerly known as OOPSLA is a forum for discussion of dynamic languages, their implementation and application. While mature dynamic languages including Smalltalk, Lisp, Scheme, Self, Prolog, and APL continue to grow and inspire new converts, a new generation of dynamic scripting languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, Tcl, and JavaScript are successful in a wide range of applications. DLS provides a place for researchers and practitioners to come together and share their knowledge, experience, and ideas for future research and development. DLS 2010 invites high quality papers reporting original research, innovative contributions or experience related to dynamic languages, their implementation and application. Accepted Papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Innovative language features and implementation techniques
• Development and platform support, tools
• Interesting applications
• Domain-oriented programming
• Very late binding, dynamic composition, and runtime adaptation
• Reflection and meta-programming
• Software evolution
• Language symbiosis and multi-paradigm languages
• Dynamic optimization
• Hardware support
• Experience reports and case studies
• Educational approaches and perspectives
• Object-oriented, aspect-oriented, and context-oriented programming

Submissions and proceedings

We invite original contributions that neither have been published previously nor are under review by other refereed events or publications. Research papers should describe work that advances the current state of the art. Experience papers should be of broad interest and should describe insights gained from substantive practical applications. The program committee will evaluate each contributed paper based on its relevance, significance, clarity, and originality.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library.

Papers are to be submitted electronically at http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=dls2010 in PDF format. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages and need to use the ACM format, templates for which can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.

Important dates

 Submission of papers: June 1, 2010 (hard deadline) Author notification: July 15, 2010 Final versions due: August 13, 2010 DLS 2010: October 18, 2010 SPLASH/OOPSLA 2010: October 17-21, 2010 

Program chair

William Clinger, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Program committee

• Robby Findler (Northwestern University)
• Jeffrey S. Foster (University of Maryland)
• Lars Thomas Hansen (Adobe Systems)
• Charlotte Herzeel (University of Brussels)
• S. Alexander Spoon (Google)
• Eric Tanter (University of Chile)
• Jan Vitek (Purdue University)
• Alessandro Warth (Viewpoints Research Institute)

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.

Jeffrey Shallit on Ken Iverson - 2004

Just thought I'd let you know I've posted Jeffrey Shallit's unbridged talk at Ken Iverson's memorial in Toronto in 2004.

And for the pundits among you... I'll have you know that the full version of the 1974 Origins of APL video has had 3,502 plays to date. Who would have thought!


Jaffrey Shallit @ KEI Memorial

Catherine | MySpace Video

To read more about it see my blog.

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