APL-Club Germany, Schwetzingen, November 6 1992

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 79

We haven’t often been able to cover meetings of other European APL user groups in Vector but I was delighted to be invited to attend a meeting of the APL-Club of Germany recently and I thought that the readership of Vector might be interested in some details of the meeting and also of the APL-Club of Germany. The APL-Club of Germany has about 120 members and conducts a broadly similar range of activities to the BAA. In contrast to the BAA, the APL-Club only has two meetings per annum but these are all day events. On this occasion the meeting was held in a hotel in Schwetzingen (just outside Heidelberg) and a number of delegates met the night before at the hotel for a social evening.

The meeting was opened by Dieter Lattermann who welcomed the 30 or so delegates. Dieter used the opportunity to cover APL-Club business — in particular he distributed copies of Gary Helzer’s APL Encyclopaedia which the APL-Club had translated into German. He gave a report on APL92 (see Vector 9.2 for our report) and gave news of next year’s event in Toronto. Seven 45 minute presentations were given covering a diverse range of topics.

The first two talks, Michael Zippel’s “An Application of APL in the Roofing Trade” and Walter Schwarz’s “Compiled APL for Supercomputers”, are transcribed as separate articles.

Summary of Other Sessions¶

I contributed a talk (in English I’m afraid) on APL.68000 and also gave an overview of what the British APL Association gets up to. Otto Rusy talked about some work he had been doing in the product marketing field on product positioning, and then moved on to share his discovery of dialog boxes with the audience. Otto also explained some of the Dyalog window control system functions.

Bernd Gerber of the Karl-Friedrich-Gymnasium Mannheim talked about his efforts to introduce APL to his students. He has been using APL since 1985 in the form of various ‘low cost APLs’ starting with Pocket APL; then after a brief experiment with I-APL he has moved on to a combination of STSC APL and TryAPL2. Bernd painted a familiar picture of small or non-existent budgets constraining his efforts. APL is taught in some of the informatic courses, but is up against alternative options such as Pascal, BASIC, Comal and increasingly the use of packages such as Works. On the brighter side, Bernd reported that there are always some students who become fervent APL enthusiasts, although his comment that they never join the normal classes seemed to paint a familiar profile of the budding APLer.

Frank Juschus from the DKFZ — a medical research centre — gave an interesting talk about the Heidelberg APL Ray Tracing Model. Working on mainframes or very fast PCs (50Mhz 486 machines) they are using APL to analyse complex 3-dimensional structures for medical diagnosis and treatment. 2-dimensional data resulting from CAT scans are converted into pseudo 3-dimensional arrays to allow a visualisation of the scanned object from arbitrary angles.

Steven Halasz of Lingo Allegro from the USA gave a closing talk which reviewed attempts over the years to ‘sell’ APL. I must confess that since the presentation relied on an intimate knowledge of prime-time US comedy shows, my notes degenerated markedly. Indeed, I find that I can no longer distinguish between statements that I was meant to read as true and those that were meant to be taken as false. However, collected ‘bon mots’ included: ‘if you weren’t so stupid you’d like APL’. I think we were told that APL is successful (or was it unsuccessful) because ‘IBM likes APL’ and ‘children like APL’ (is either of these statements true? … are they connected?!).