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

APL2010 programme published

APL2010 has published its programme.

BAPLA09 presentations online

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

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.

Annual General Meeting 2010

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

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.

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)

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.

APL2000 announces 2010 conference

Springtime in Washington with APL2000

APL2000 User Conference - April 26-27, 2010


Plan to join the APL community as we gather in our Nation's capital to focus on the latest developments in APL2000 software. Attend informative presentations, engage in stimulating discussions, and enjoy the camaraderie of spending a few days with fellow APL enthusiasts. Special weekend hotel rates will be available to conference attendees who arrive early.
SAVE THE DATE

Mark your calendar for the APL2000 User Conference

April 26-27, 2010
The APL2000 Team looks forward to seeing you in April.

Sonia Beekman

Director of Sales & Marketing
APLNow LLC dba APL2000
One Research Court, Suite 140
Rockville, MD 20850
Phone: 301-208-7150
Fax: 301-208-7151
E-mail: sonia.beekman@apl2000.com

www.apl2000.com

APL2010 Call for papers

APL2010 has called for papers.

2009 I.P. Sharp Associates Christmas party

Graeme Robertson has announced the 2009 I.P. Sharp London Christmas party will be held at its usual venue, The Plumbers Arms in Victoria, from 5pm on Fri 18 December.

Finnish Forest Seminar 15-16 Apr 2010

FinnAPL has announced its annual Foreset Seminar w3ill be held “somewhere in Southern Finland” on 15-16 April 2010. The programme should cover the versions of Dyalog, Windows and J and some databases.

Contact Kimmo Linna for details: kimmo.linna@finnair.com

BAPLA09

Photos from the BAPLA09 conference in Reading have been posted. Also the presentations.

APL article on Wikipedia

At yesterday's meeting, BAA London drafted a new opening for the Wikipedia article on APL, and posted it on the APL Wiki for further work (especially collecting citations) before it goes on Wikipedia.

Take a look at the draft and see what you can contribute.

Countdown to the Worldwide Programming Contest

Now less thab three weeks before Dyalog’s Worldwide Programming Contest closes. Student entries will win $5,500 in prizes; others can earn as much introducing them to APL. And the winner gets travel to Dyalog09 from anywhere in the world.

We’ve started a countdown on the Vector front page.

BAA London meeting 26 June

Next meeting will be at:

The Knights Templar
95 Chancery Lane
Holborn
London
WC2A 1DT
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=WC2A%201DT

On 26 June. 2pm downstairs for 2.30pm up.

We have a room booked from 14.30 'til 17.00 away from all the noise
and bustle and overlooking Carey Street

Annual General Meeting 2009

The Annual General Meeting of the British APL Association will be held on Monday 8th June as part of the BAPLA 2009 Conference.

The meeting, at Wokefield Park, near Reading, will commence at 1:45 pm and will be followed by presentations from the following speakers:

• Stephen Taylor (Lambent Technology) - Who the H*** Needs XML?
• Sonia Beekman (APL2000) - The Product
• Kai Jaeger (APL Team Ltd) - Presentation Technology
• Roger Hui (JSoftware Inc) - Inner Product, An Old/New Problem
• Simon Garland (Kx)

If you intend to come to the meeting, please notify george@optima-systems.co.uk to book your place.

For further information about the conference and directions to Wokefield Park, please visit
www.bapla09.com.

Nicholas Small
Honorary Treasurer, British APL Association

01223-570850

treasurer@vector.org.uk