APL and the Pocket PC

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 14

The reviews by Ray Cannon and Adrian Smith on Dyadic’s version of Dyalog for the PocketPC [1,2] were interesting and I promptly downloaded “PocketAPL” onto my Compaq iPAQ. Whilst the beta version of the product clearly works (and comes with some neat little utilities), sadly it will be of little use to me as a APLX user. I have little time or inclination to change large amounts of code on my Mac for porting over to the iPAQ. In this respect I was concerned at Adrian’s comment “If we can all share the same interpreter, so much the better” [2]. Whilst it is superficially attractive to only have one APL interpreter on all hardware (not just the Pocket PC) with the aim of removing the very problem I describe above, I believe that this would lead to the demise of APL. Like English, APL is dynamic and evolving and one of the spurs to this is the competition between the vendors and their supporters. So, a single dialect of APL, perhaps from a single vendor, would not only probably lead to price increases (lack of competition) but would stifle APL evolution. As we all know, those things that do not evolve eventually die. So I hope that MicroAPL produce a Pocket PC version of APLX, not just for the benefit of their current users, but to maintain healthy competition in the APL market. The same applies to other vendors and their dialects of APL.

Philip Bath

1. Cannon R. Dyalog APL for Window CE (beta). A hacker’s first impression. Vector 2002;19:(2),46-51.
2. Smith A. If you go down to the woods today … First experiences with PocketAPL. Vector 2002;19:(2),

[Reply] I am sorry for the misunderstanding. What I meant to say was that all the Dyalog applications for the Pocket can share the same installation, as the Dyalog runtime is a separately installable component from Handango. This means that if you post (say) a card-trick simulator workspace (see the Esmerelda simulator in the article by Richard Smith and Gene McDonnell on page 101) it can be a really small download. Adrian