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.