APL96 Western Europe

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 6

Who is Organising it¶

APL96 will be a sponsored by SigAPL, and managed by C/M Planners, who did such a solid job for us at San Antonio. The Co-chairs are Stuart Yarus and David Eastwood, and the Programme Committee is led jointly by Philip Benkard and Adrian Smith. Gitte Christiansen is working with the vendors, and Anne Faust is working with Lynne Shaw on marketing.

Where and When will it be?¶

The search for a venue is on! At the time of going to press, the favoured site is the British Isles, but Lisbon and Padua have also been earmarked as possibilities. By the time Vector is shipped, we should know the answer to this one, so look out for an insert! The date will be towards the end of July or early in August.

What Kind of Conference are we Planning?¶

More of what worked well in Texas! Basically fewer streams, more workshops and as much ‘hands-on’ as we can organise/fund. The hot topics look like “Nested Arrays — get it right first time”; an algorithms workshop following up the excellent sessions at San Antonio (Andreas Geyer-Schulz and Ben Best); how to get that “Designed for Windows 95” logo on YOUR software; setting up APL as a server application (TCP/IP for softies) anywhere on your corporate network.

We certainly intend to make the vendors work a lot harder! Rather than shutting them away in an exhibition and making them buy lunch, they can have a decent 3-hour slot to really teach us how to use their stuff!

The idea of evening sessions was floated at the San Antonio banquet, and (on a quick show of hands) many were in favour and almost none against. We will aim for a pattern of mostly plenary mornings, breaking out into parallel workshops alongside contributed papers in the afternoons. Because the workshops are likely to be over-subscribed, we will repeat them in the early evening, and if we have enough good papers, these too may run on after tea.