Introductory Notes (meetings section)

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 48

In this issue we cover three out of the four Autumn meetings of the Association, plus the 1984 I.P. Sharp Users Meeting. Papers and discussion from the November seminar ‘Information Centres Revisited’ are being held over to the next issue; this is partly to keep this one down to a reasonable size and partly because the change of venue has rather thinned out the spring programme.

‘APL and Knowledge-based Systems’ was held on September 21st, and has yielded two excellent papers by M.J. Winfield and Christopher Harvey. The second of these is really a case study of a ‘Do it Yourself’ expert system, so it is to be found under the ‘Case Studies’ heading at the end of the general papers.

‘How to Survive in XXAPL’ was a workshop held on October 19th. The collection of notes on VS APL under CMS shows how a little work can add a great deal of power to this particular flavour of APL.

‘What’s New for 1985’ was an ambitious day-long sequence of product forums and exhibitions. Dick Bowman gives his reflections as organiser, and I have included some of my own comments on some of the more exciting announcements. Many thanks to Roy Tallis for acting as photographer for the day.

‘IPSA 1984 Users Meeting’ was held in Toronto in October. This was not at all a parochial event, and I hope my notes will be of interest to all APL users, not just those on the Sharp system.