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.

MicroAPL releases APLX 5

MicroAPL announces the commercial release of APLX Version 5 for all platforms – Windows, MacOS and Linux. APLX Server Editions, and 64-bit implementations, are also now available.

You can download free-of-charge evaluation copies of APLX Version 5 from the MicroAPL website www.microapl.co.uk/apl.

This is a quick summary of the new features introduced in Version 5 (see further details):

• Performance Profiling can be used to find out which parts of your APL code take the most time to execute, or are executed most often, and so helps you to determine which functions to concentrate on when optimising performance. You can view the performance data in a number of different ways, and easily 'drill down' to get more detail on exactly where execution time is spent. APLX Version 5 introduces a very easy-to-use menu-based profiling facility, or, for more detailed control, a new system function for profiling. The results are available in tables, in graphical form, and as a detailed web page report.
• Function, Workspace and Text Comparison
• A new Scrapbook and Idiom facility, to help you re-use code snippets and APL idioms.
• ‘Mixins’, an innovative extension to the object-oriented language features introduced in APLX v4. Mixins allow you to extend your user-defined classes so that, at run-time, they dynamically 'mix in' functionality (i.e. methods and properties, and perhaps events) from one or more other classes; these can be internal (user-defined, and written in APL), or external (.Net, Java, Ruby etc, or a built-in APLX system class).
• New external class interface: R Statistical Software. R is an open-source language and set of packages aimed principally at statistical analysis. It includes a huge library of pre-written statistical and mathematical routines, which can be accessed immediately and very conveniently from APLX. It also includes mathematically-oriented graphing facilities, and support for complex numbers.
• New Primitive Functions: Unique, Union, Intersection, Stop, Left, Pass, Right, and Not Match.
• XML Conversion facilities
• Support for SVG Graphics
• Larger component files.

R… statistics!

Simon Marsden reaches for the rich, open-source resources of the R language – not a big stretch with his APLX-R interface

APLX 5ß out now

MicroAPL has released APLX 5 for public ß-testing, with the new XML interface and inbuilt performance profiling.