News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 8

Kx Systems¶

Kx Announces Executive Changes¶

Palo Alto (June 1, 2005) - Kx Systems, leader in high-performance databases and timeseries analysis for finance, today announced several executive changes and promotions. Effective July 1, Janet Lustgarten, a co-founder who served as Kx CEO since 1993, assumes the role of Chairman of the Board. Lustgarten is spending more time with her family and will continue to work with Kx as a strategic consultant. She is succeeded as CEO by Arthur Whitney, who becomes chief executive after 12 years as Kx CTO.

Janet has done an outstanding job of making Kx a top provider of software for financial services,” said Whitney. “We are fortunate she will continue to guide Kx as the company strengthens its leadership position and accelerates its growth.”

Said Lustgarten, “I am extremely proud of what the Kx team has accomplished to date and am excited about participating in its continued success. Our products have been forward-thinking for more than a decade. We anticipate that Kx will continue to solve leading-edge problems in financial services.”

Simon Garland has been tapped as CTO; he has been with Kx for three years in the role of SVP Technology and brings nearly 30 years of experience in software architecture and development to his new role. Sharon Knestrick has been promoted to Director of Finance reporting to Robert Fourr, COO. Knestrick has been with Kx for two years in the role of controller.

“We have a senior management team and board of directors with many years of experience at the company,” said Whitney. “And we continue to have a strong relationship with First Derivatives plc, who have provided sales management and customer services to Kx since 2001.”

About Kx¶

Kx Systems enables leading companies to capture, analyze, compare and store vast amounts of streaming and historical data at real-time speeds. Kx products close the gap between what ordinary databases deliver and what today's real-time enterprises need. For more information and Kx and its products, visit www.kx.com.

Dyalog Ltd¶

Welcome to the Dyalog User Conference 2005¶

We are pleased to invite you to join us for the third annual Dyalog APL Conference, to be held at LO Skolen, Elsinore, Denmark, on October 19th-21st, 2005.

The annual Dyalog APL conference provides a unique opportunity to learn about the ways in which Dyalog APL is being used to deliver solutions to problems in commercial and academic environments across the globe. As usual, we have invited speakers who we believe have a story to tell which will inspire and educate - and possibly also entertain - most of us. If you think we forgot you, and you have a story you would like to tell, please contact us as soon as possible!

All participants will receive a Beta release of Version 11.0 of Dyalog APL, and Dyalog will be hosting a number of workshops to explain how our users can benefit from the new functionality in this version, which we plan to release shortly after the conference. For price and booking information, and the programme when it becomes available, see our website, http://www.dyalog.com.

A Few Words on Version 11.0¶

Work on the next version of Dyalog APL is now so far advanced that we are able to discuss some of the most significant features which we intend to include in what will be known as Version 11.0, which we expect to make generally available in the 4^th Quarter of 2005:

Object Oriented Extensions¶

Perhaps the most significant feature of Version 11.0 will be the new system function ⎕NEW, which will make it possible to instantiate instances of Classes which are entirely defined using APL. Classes will allow APL users to take advantage of Object Oriented design techniques, which complement the traditional Array or Vector notation which “traditional” APL provides. We believe that classes and will add significant new tools of thought to our arsenals, and make it easier to share and reuse code.

Core Language Enhancements¶

In addition to the significant new language features described above, version 11.0 will contain a handful of language enhancements, including features which have been pioneered in other APL systems. New language features will include a Function Power operator, Squish Quad Indexing, Lowest Common Multiplier (LCM) and Greatest Common Divisor (GCD).

64 Bit Version¶

In addition to the current 32-bit version, which will be available on the same platforms as version 10, version 11.0 will be available in a 64-bit version – initially under Windows XP/64 and AIX. The major benefit of the 64-bit version is the increase in maximum workspace size. The 64-bit version will allow you to use all the memory available in current hardware systems – up to 10¹⁹ bytes. Version 11.0 will have a limit of 4 billion elements on each array, which we expect to remove in 2006. The 64-bit version will be licensed separately from the 32-bit version, at a higher price – and will not be available as a free runtime.

Come to Dyalog 2005 to learn more about Version 11.0 and our plans for the years to come!

Optima Systems Ltd¶

They keep on telling us that there are 24 hours in a day. All I can say then is that the hours must be getting shorter. Half way through the year and we still haven't started some of the projects scheduled for the beginning of January!

We continue to be very active with our financial customers here in the UK and are making a lot of new friends. The APL systems under development have proven themselves to be fast, efficient and massive time savers. Using APL combined with some of the newer XP programming techniques and close working relationships with the business users has given us a major advantage over traditional IT department methods. Key features of the approach include;

On-cost delivery
On-time delivery
Regular, incremental production releases
Simple project management
Little or no up-front project specification required
Happy users
Very happy managers
Ecstatic directors

Work continues with our Clinical Research colleagues in America and has allowed us to re-launch the “LV” product. LV allows us to simulate the use and effectiveness of drugs around the world and match the generated profit from sales to the cost of making these sales. Once again APL gives us a flexible approach to the system design and implementation AND allows us to calculate across many large arrays of numbers.

Finally the product which actually should have started in earnest last year and is designed using Dyalog’s Pocket APL should soon start to take proper shape. If we can, finally, find the time we hope to be in a position to demo it next year.

Causeway Graphical Systems Ltd¶

There was a song once “You never know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone” (Joni Mitchell, I think) – for Causeway the opposite is true. More a case of “If you want to know what you’ve got, run a seminar on it”. The first public run-out of our APL to C# conversion kit went much better than we could have hoped. It was very hard work (for us) but very rewarding for the delegates, who went away with fully working examples that they can copy and extend. All we needed to add to the converter was support for ⎕DL (so an ancient LIFE program could pause for a few 10ths of a second between generations) and a couple of new overloads for strings.

So, what do we have, how do we make it more widely available, and how much should it cost?

• an engine to allow array-thinkers to code productively in VB.Net or C#. If you are a ‘closet APLer’ hidden in a big corporation coding new systems in a conventional language, then this could really make your day. What we can offer you is a library of array functions which run on all the native data-types and are fast and reliable. If you knew VS APL, you know these.
• an escape hatch for ‘legacy’ APL systems which are too damned expensive (or complex) to rewrite. Our generated C# code is well-structured and easy to read and modify. It is quite possible to make a one-off conversion to C# or VB.Net and hand over the generated code to a programming team for integration and maintenance.
• a chance to write that all-new killer-app in your favourite modern APL and ship it as a single-file EXE or DLL without giving away your APL source or bolting on any kind of runtime engine.

The array library is easy to document, and is unlikely to suffer many big changes. I think we can just sell this off the web at a very reasonable price. Look out for it on www.sharparrays.com by the time you read this. The conversion tools will be available on a ‘seminar only’ basis for quite a while yet, and we can take a maximum of 6 people through this at a time. This limits the availability, and suggests a 4-digit price. If you are desperate to get your hands on this, call us sooner rather than later.