General Correspondence
Vector 1:2, page 5
Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 5
We have been inundated with letters following the publication of the inaugural issue of VECTOR. One consequence is that we have split the letters section into general letters, which appear here, and technical letters, which are in the Technical section. It would be helpful if correspondents would indicate which section their letter is intended for. Letters containing APL symbols normally appear in the Technical section: please note the requirements on the inclusion of APL code stated on the inside cover. The Editor reserves the right to edit letters unless a writer states that a letter is to be published in full or not at all.
Unenlightened¶
Sir: I Was at ‘APL in Focus’ on 22nd June, and I am writing to say how much I enjoyed reading VECTOR, particularly the AGM notes, during the more erudite sessions. Also, I expect ‘Why APL?” to be helpful in explaining APL to some unenlightened colleagues.
Yours sincerely
Simon Witcomb,
Nabisco Brands Ltd.,
[street address omitted]
Reading,
Berks.
Auspicious¶
Sir: First let me congratulate you on a most impressively auspicious inaugural issue of VECTOR. It appears to contain something for anyone with an interest in APL — my only worry is that any attempt to follow it must be an anti-climax!
As the introduction to the APL competition gave no name to receive entries, I am enclosing mine with a brief related communication which you might consider for the letters column. The ‘APL84 in focus’ meeting showed that some people are concerned with accelerating the execution of APL, and until we all get ‘compilers’ we should make our own attempts to balance efficient coding, quick execution and not filling workspace.
Yours sincerely,
Andrew Tarr
ICI plc (Mond Division)
Finance and Info Systems Dept.,
[street address omitted]
Runcorn,
Cheshire.
Editor: Mr. Tarr’s comments will be included in our presentation of the “This is Your Life” competition results in the next issue.
Apology¶
Sir: As VECTOR is published by the British APL Association, may I be allowed to use its pages to make a public apology to Norman Thomson, and to correct a false impression which people may get from reading my article in “The Role of APL in Statistics Teaching” which was also published by the APL User Group (as it was then called).
Thomson’s paper on multivariate analysis, which appeared in the proceedings of the APL83 Washington conference, and which I refer to on p.131 of my article (another apology for spelling his name wrong!), is a very good example of the way in which APL can be used to enhance a student’s understanding of statistics. That is what I intended to convey. Unfortunately, the wording of my article can be interpreted as giving rather the opposite impression. If the last two sentences of that paragraph are interchanged, it then conveys unambiguously the meaning which I had intended.
Sorry Norman!
Yours sincerely,
Alan G. Hawkes.
Dept. of Management Science & Statistics,
University College of Swansea,
[street address omitted]
Swansea.
Enthusiasm¶
Sir: Can I say how pleased we were to have such a well produced and meaty journal to take to Helsinki. It certainly had great impact and I was sufficiently carried away to announce that it was now the international APL journal. This was greeted enthusiastically by most, and many offers of contributions were forthcoming — let’s hope they materialise. Competition to Quote Quad was taken more philosophically by the SIGAPL team!
Yours sincerely,
Philip Goacher,
Chairman, British APL Association,
The British Computer Society
[street address omitted]
London W1.
Sensible¶
Sir: May I first, in my capacity as Chairman of the BCS Publications Committee, congratulate the APL Specialist Group on its production of the first issue of the new periodical ‘VECTOR’. First impressions are extremely favourable and the BCS should be proud to have this added to their list of regular publications. Maybe more Specialist Groups will follow the example.
The first “Letter to the Editor” was from Mr. R. Bowman on the subject of Character Representation in APL; may I please comment on this letter, although I do not pretend to be an APL expert.
In reality most computer languages have encountered the kind of difficulty which Mr. Bowman highlights; however, the authors of these languages have tackled the problem in a different way. Rather than invent new symbols which do not exist on standard terminals they use a combination of standard ASCII characters to represent special symbols. Obvious examples which come to mind are the “.GT.” in Fortran to represent “>”. Now it occurs to me that if APL users are anxious to promote the exchange of programs using standard protocols, which accept only ASCII characters, then they too could invent equivalents simply for the purpose of communication. (N.B. II in ASCII means Information Interchange.) Clearly text converters would be needed but they should be quite simple to produce. Whether this helps the publication of APL programs is another question, a lot would depend on how “sensible” the equivalences were.
I am sure that this idea is not original but hopefully it will keep this correspondence alive.
Yours sincerely,
G.N. Lance,
Chairman, BCS Publications Committee,
University of Bristol,
Computer Science Department,
School of Mathematics,
[street address omitted]
Bristol.
Brevity¶
Sir: I am very much enjoying reading VECTOR and would like to offer my congratulation to all the members of its working group for putting together such a readable, bumper, inaugural issue. A success such as this will be difficult to follow so I wish all of them great good fortune in the tasks that lie ahead. My one and only criticism of the publication is its “perfect” binding which, in the case of my copy, is turning out otherwise.
I was very interested in the matter of an ASCII-based character set for APL which was the subject of Mr Bowman’s letter as well as being a topic of numerous articles elsewhere in the journal. I became so moved by the force of the arguments in its favour that I felt impelled to sit down and try to design one which would lose less in brevity than FGL, because brevity is not only the soul of wit, it is also one of APL’s great strengths.
Yours sincerely,
L. Llewellyn-Jones
Reuters Ltd,
[street address omitted]
London EC4.
Editor: Mr. Llewellyn-Jones appended a further nineteen pages to his letter, which we have included later in this issue — see “APLpip — The Hard Seed of a Health and Wealth Giving Fruit”. The covers of the first 500 copies of Vol. 1. No. 1. were not laminated in order to meet the Helsinki deadline: some of these have deteriorated prematurely.