WIMPS and Bach on the Amiga

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 60

Oh what fun this was!! There are two streams at the low end of the market:

1. PC look-alikes ⇨ 286 ⇨ 386
2. 68000-based (Mac, Atari, Amiga) with possible PC DOS windows if you want Lotus.

These latter come with all sorts of fancy features, generally known as WIMPS (Windows, Icons, Mice … ); how do you implement APL to take advantage of WIMPS …

• to use mice and windows to help the programmer?
• to make it easy to develop WIMPish applications?

The Amiga implementation is a fully multi-tasking APL which can generate and use windows very easily. Pull-down menus and mice are handled as a natural part of application design. You can cut and paste from the built-in terminal emulator into your local APL session, or from that session into the function editor.

With 8Mbyte of memory to go at, you can set background tasks running and still get very acceptable response at your primary APL session. Functions are provided to handle the (virtually HiFi) 4-channel sound and speech synthesis (SAY PHONETIC ‘Hello, I am an Amiga’). The high point of a fascinating demo was a demonstration of the Bach Crab Canon (a theme which harmonizes with itself when reversed); surely Bach anticipated the existence of the ‘reverse’ function by some 200 years when he wrote this useful piece of test data!