Report: APL Germany in Munich

notes by Adrian Smith

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 85

APL Germany in Munich, 30th April 2002¶

Announcement: APL2 for the Workstation, Version-2¶

Full details of the product are best researched on IBM’s website, but this was a piece of APL news well worth hearing. The new release comes on a single CD which installs on AIX, Linux, Solaris and Windows. ("If anybody asks about OS/2, well OS/2 isn’t there anymore"). Some of the key features are:

full support for Namespaces, implemented in the same way as in mainframe APL2. Namespaces can be created in any of the environments and can be run using a suppled runtime packager.
The runtime library (for all platforms) is FREE. This allows you to develop your application on the platform of your choice, move it to any other platform via )OUT and )IN and then create an appropriate runtime application from it. Obviously, you will need to install your APL2 on each target platform to do this, but see the licence conditions below.
an interface to TCL/TK is included, so that you may build cross-platform Gui applications using an established Gui toolkit. Your TCL front-end can include callbacks to run APL2 functions.

What is more, this APL2 release is included in the IBM "Scholars Programme" which means it is free for educational use. For the rest of us, the price is $1,500 per developer (note this means what it says, so you are allowed to work on multiple machines or operating systems for the price of a single copy).

This APL looks like a serious contender for writing the kind of "lights-out" number-bashing code which APL is so good at, and for deploying the results on any of the major Unix platforms. The provision of namespaces is an excellent step forward, and I am glad to report that at least some voices (maybe even a majority) were raised in favour of Control Structures as the next likely GSE requirement. Meanwhile, the BAA has begun the process of finding out just what is involved in signing up a UK school for the free educational licence.