APL86 Standards Report

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 110

On Saturday 5th July, just prior to APL86, the ISO WG (Working Group) for the standardisation of APL met for the ninth time, in Manchester. Representatives from Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the USA attended the meeting.

By this time, all the technical work on the document had been completed, and it had been accepted as a second Draft Proposal by a vote of 13 approvals, 6 approvals with comments, no disapprovals and 1 abstention. Karl Soop of Sweden, and Raymond Tisserand, the convenor of the ISO WG, collated the comments and Karl visited the editor of the document, Alex Morrow, in Palo Alto to make the necessary alterations.

The modified draft was sent to the ISO SC22 central secretary for processing as a DIS (Draft International Standard) in June, and it is this document, along with a French translation, that will eventually become an IS (International Standard). Unfortunately these things take time to percolate through the bureaucratic layers, and the document is unlikely to become a DIS before early 1987, or an IS before the end of that year.

After this had been reported to the group Raymond Tisserand passed the convenorship and secretariat of the WG over to Lee Dickey of Canada. Raymond had convened the group for the last five years, and was now retiring.

So with the APL standard all but put to bed, what was left for us to do? Lee Dickey presented three documents to the meeting, each suggesting further work items: one from the ANSII group, one from the BSI group and one from a list produced at the Minnowbrook implementers conference. After much discussion the WG decided that a new work item called ‘Extended APL’ should be proposed. This would include the following topics for consideration in a new standard APL: generalised arrays, operator extensions (primitive and defined), the scope of names, files, complex arithmetic and exception handling. It was agreed that the group need not restrict itself to this list, or even commit to work on any topic mentioned. The motion was passed by a vote – 9 for, 0 against and 4 abstentions. The abstainers were either unhappy about the items in the list or felt that work should not proceed until the current standard was published.

Lee Dickey then presented a position paper on standardisation and validation. The paper suggested the idea that a test suite for the validation of APL systems purporting to be standard-conforming could be developed and controlled by an international group, such as the ISO WG itself. It was noted that this would be a world first, as it was usual for conformance validation to be performed by independent or national testing houses. After lengthy debate it was proposed that the job of designing a validation procedure for a program product “may lie within the domain of the WG”. This wording allows the group to consider the idea before committing to a project of unknown duration and cost, and as such the motion was passed unanimously.

The ISO WG agreed to meet again during the week before APL87, in Dallas.

During APL86 itself, there was a sparsely attended session on the APL standard. Raymond Tisserand presented a brief history of the standardisation effort, from the time the French standards body AFNOR started in 1978 up until the present. At the end of his talk Karl Soop and Paul Barnetson thanked Raymond for all his hard work over the years, and surprised him with a gift from the WG – a bottle of scotch and a bouquet of flowers. Karl then reported the details of the most recent round of technical work on the draft and Lee Dickey explained the decisions taken at the WG meeting. They were then joined by Clark Wiedmann who pioneered ANSII involvement in the work, Bob Bernecky of IPSA and David Livingstone of Newcastle Polytechnic, for a panel discussion. Questions concerning the possible standardisation of files and GKS (Graphics Kernel System) bindings, among others, were discussed.

The session finished with an invitation: anyone interested in getting involved with the standardisation work should contact their national representative. For the UK, you should contact David Ziemann at the address given on the inside back cover of VECTOR.

The tireless work of Raymond Tisserand, Alex Morrow and Clark Wiedmann was honoured during the APL86 banquet, when John Myrna, the chair of the US APL Special Interest Group, presented them with the SIGAPL outstanding achievement award for 1986.