Technical Editorial

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 103

Welcome to the technical section of VECTOR. In these pages we hope to present items of interest to technical APL readers. Therefore, in future issues of VECTOR you will find papers, articles, APL code, algorithms and more. There will also be a regular technical letters page and prize competition. We want to encourage you to contribute to any of the above and would particularly welcome letters and/or APL code, with a view to maintaining a dialogue on particular areas of interest.

In this issue we present four contributed papers. The first one is by Alan Hawkes, professor at the Department of Management Science and Statistics of the University College of Swansea, who shares with us some of his work in a paper entitles “Complex numbers in APL”. As well as providing a listing of his complex number functions for APL without using a complex data type, he also gives a mathematical treatment of the algorithms that lead to them. Although written to run under MIPS APL, the code requires only minor alteration in one or two cases to be run on other implementations.

Next, David Doherty of the British United Provident Association (BUPA) has contributed “SCREENIO — a full screen manager”. David charts the development of his screen design package, and shows how flexibility is preserved via the specification of a set of validation rules.

“Partitioning Data in APL” is submitted by Jonathan Barman. In it, Jonathan discusses a range of techniques for manipulating partitioned data within a standard VS APL environment. Useful partition functions are developed and explained in detail within the text.

Finally, David Ziemann presents his paper on the current draft of the international APL language standard. “Inside the international APL standard” takes an in-depth look at the way the standard works, what the actual content is, and how it might be useful to us.