International APL News

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

This column is open to other APL Associations outside the UK; please write to us with your news and we shall be pleased to broadcast extracts for you. A substantial number of VECTOR subscriptions are from overseas and we hope in this way to keep APL users in touch with each other internationally.

EuroAPL¶

EuroAPL is the international organisation supporting European APL groups in various ways. We had hoped for a glowing progress report on news of APL in Europe, but sadly this is not to be — not in this issue anyway. Philip Goacher is this year's Chairman of EuroAPL as well as being the Chairman of our Association. He writes somewhat ruefully:

"EuroAPL has been supported from funds allocated by the Commission of the European Communities to the 'Multi-Annual Programme for Data Processing', which has allowed us to meet the travelling costs of members attending the regular meetings in Brussels."

"Unfortunately the proposal for extending these funds was not approved in March and the budget has now run out!"

"Whilst waiting for Council to reach a decision on continued finance for the work carried out under the programme — principally standardisation work — all meetings for the various activities, including EuroAPL, have ceased."

"Members of the EuroAPL Board attending APL84 will meet to discuss the EuroAPL programme during the conference."

So much for entente cordiale: it's fine so long as someone pays for it. We hope to bring you more stimulating news of EuroAPL in the next issue.

I.P. Sharp 1984 APL User Meeting¶

For those of you with the opportunity (or excuse) to visit Canada, the regular Sharp APL user meeting is being held at the Westin Hotel, Toronto, from October 15th — 17th 1984. The following details are reprinted from a public mailbox message on the IPSA system.

"The Information Centre and Changing Technologies"

"Featuring keynote addresses by H. Mitchell Watson Jr., IBM Vice President and President, System Products Division, IBM Corporation, White Plains, New York; and by James Cunnie, Director of Office System Planning, ITT Corporation, Stratford, Connecticut. There will be a special half day presentation by James Martin, who is according to Computer Weekly the computer industry's most widely read author and best attended lecturer."

"Session themes include:-

• Introducing the global information centre
• Implementing a global information centre
• Menus, mice and masters in application design
• Managing the information revolution
• Evaluating and implementing user productivity tools
• Managing and implementing international systems
• Some management tools for an information centre
• Supporting information centre users
• Exploiting networks
• I. P. Sharp: changing technologies and future directions
• The evolution of the APL environment: two perspectives

"Optional tutorials (October 18th) cover:-

• For managers — The Sharp APL system: a management perspective
• For technicians — Dump analysis facility

"The registration fee for the 1984 meeting is $400 (Canadian) or $320 (US). There is an additional fee of $100 (Canadian) or $80 (US) to register for either one of the tutorials. A conference brochure and registration form will be mailed in early May to everyone on the IPSA newsletter mailing list. For more information contact:

Rosanne Wild, IPSA Ltd., Suite 1900, 2 First Canadian Place, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5X 1E3. IPSA Mailbox RWI. Telephone (416)-364-5361

The feedback from previous Sharp conferences has always been very good, with an accent on the practical as opposed to the theoretical. It is not normally necessary to be an IPSA customer to be allowed to register and many users of IBM APL systems or of microcomputer-based APL have learned a lot from the Sharp conferences.

Having bestowed praise where it is due, perhaps I might raise a pet complaint. Users of timesharing bureaux, and particularly their staff, seem to imagine that the APL mailbox is the only possible or civilised way of sending someone a message or distributing news. I couldn't disagree more. For it to be practical use, one has to inspect a personal mailbox at least daily, and I certainly have neither the time nor inclination for that. A telex or a letter is actually delivered personally, a great innovation.

What's more, if I want to send someone a message on a mailbox system, in practice I have to type it personally as opposed to being able to delegate it to a secretary (in theory the secretary could log on for me but in practice the lines are always down at the crucial moment). It also arrives the other end on some kind of junk printer: as sender I have no control over a tidy format. Finally, there's no lower case, which makes all my messages look like imperatives! Mailboxes may be fine for programmers but as human beings, please let's be civilised (and I haven't even mentioned the cost!).

APL84¶

By the time this issue of VECTOR is published, you may or may not have enough time to book for the APL84 International Conference at Espoo, near Helsinki, Finland, which starts on 11th and ends on 15th June 1984. A most splendid programme has been prepared, which is unfortunately too long for us to reprint here. What you will need for a late booking is a few addresses. The company handling all reservations for the conference and accomodation is:

AREA Travel Agency Ltd.,
Congress Department,
P.O. Box 227,
SF-00131 Helsinki 13.
Telex 122783 ARCON SF
Tel. Int. + 358-0-18551

There is a full range of tours available, including one to Leningrad for which a visa is required. Late bookers in the UK can contact the London-based company which is handling group bookings to see if their April deadline can be varied. The details are:

Noel Cramer,
Express Boyd Ltd.,
4/5 Bonhill Street,
London EC2A 4BX.
Tel. 01-588-8461

At the time of preparing for publication the package price for travel and accommodation varied from £328 to £498 per person depending on hotel and timing. Added to this is the cost of conference registration itself, which starts at £245 and increases asymptotically to infinity, depending on your predeliction for tours before or after the conference. All in all an expensive conference but without doubt a very worth while one — and a rare chance to visit Finland or the USSR on company business!

A Finnish Fairy Tale¶

No doubt the APL84 conference organisers have been very busy with preparing for the show. I started to get a little concerned about communications with Helsinki back in November 1983, when I wrote to Sten Kallin, who is one of the organisers, to ask if they would like to run the "Metaconference" as a service to delegates. (This is a form of computer-based interaction system that lets users contribute statements and also vote on everyone else's; interested readers can catch an account of it in the Journal of the UK Operational Research Society December 1983.)

I waited till late January 1984. No response.

I wrote again. No response.

In desperation I sent Sten Kallin a telex message care of AREA travel agency, addressed via Timo Seppala, the conference chairman. It said:

"I have never received any reply to my letters to Sten Kallin of 11th November 1983, 26th January 1984 and 7th March 1984. I am going to spread a rumour that he does not exist. Is this true? Please let me know."

No response.

Now I do know that Timo exists — at least he did in Washington, and his voice on the telephone last year sounded the same as it did when I met him in the flesh. But what about Sten Kallin? Is he in fact a virtual person, overlaid on some disc somewhere underneath a head crash? Is his name some kind of anagram? APL is actually quite good at generating anagrams. You type in the text STEN KALLIN, assign it to a variable called X or whatever, and then watch APL executing X[11?11] in a tight loop. You get the occasional duplication that way of course, but it's nothing to lose sleep about. Actually you might lose a little sleep come to think about it because the effect on the screen is most hypnotic. Try it. I bet you won't be able to hit the break key until at least one credible anagram emerges.

I started by getting the head-scratching NIT KALLSEN, then the well-known Baltic sailor SALT ENKLIN, and shortly after that the legendary giraffe impersonator IN TALLNEKS. You can also very nearly get LINK NATES, which is really quite worrying if you happen to know one of the two meanings of that obscure English word (I don't mean "anterior pair of optic lobes in brain", although that would probably be confusing as well). The mysterious electrical researcher TESLA is buried in there, as is some EKTASI. But I felt I had hit on a clue when up jumped the phrase KATE LSI NNL. Sten Kallin has had a sex change and subsequently been blown into LSI logic (large scale integration). I think the NNL is the last human gasp before digitisation, but I can't be sure.

End of fairy tale — or should I say finish. Access to the pages of VECTOR is a privilege which I have undoubtedly abused by now. It's really much safer to answer people's letters! I'm sure the conference will be very well organised, the more so for people like Sten not wasting their time writing to me. I see from the programme that Espoo, the conference venue, is an archaeological site dating back to 6000 B.C., so no doubt there will be a crop of jokes about digging up APL hieroglyphics. You may also catch a rare chance to sample the little-known Finnish custom of culinary monuments. To quote (just about) from the programme:

"Espoo is now the fourth largest city in Finland, featuring the Garden City of Tapioca as well as other achievements of modern Finnish architecture".

The more hasta, the less pasta? Have a good trip!