Editorial

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed.

I recently returned from visiting Japan for the first time in my life, where I had the pleasure of spending a day with Kyosuke Saigusa of APL Consultants of Japan. He was revelling in the support for Unicode introduced in recent releases of APL2.

Japanese writers nimbly mix a phonetic script, a script based on Chinese ideographs, the Roman alphabet (the romaji), and both Arabic and Japanese numerals. These scripts are laid out both left-to-right, top-to-bottom and top-to-bottom, right to left. Japanese typographers compose pages in which these reading directions are mixed, a challenge to both aesthetics and agility.

In this world the elegant glyphs of APL seemed from the very start to fit in very comfortably. When working at IBM years ago, Saigusa-san translated the first APL manual into Japanese. But what typographers in Japan manage as routine was problematic with computers until the advent of Unicode.

Saigusa-san describes in this issue the tutorial tool work he and his son have built to make APL2 more accessible in Japanese.

We're pleased to publish a memoir of Donald McIntyre, for many years a contributor to Vector, written by his friend Keith Smillie. McIntyre was an early adopter of what Ken Iverson pioneered and dubbed as ‘expository programming’. (See Vector Vol.22, No.3)

Plenty to study in this issue. Jan Karman gives the next instalment of Financial Math In q and Neville Holmes of Functional Calculation. Stevan Apter's No Stinking Loops has a meaty and cunningly-constructed tutorial from Stevan Apter on “Tables with calculated columns”. And J-ottings 53 simplifies betting using complex numbers.

Sylvia Camacho profits from J to conduct a “stroppy” dialogue with Graham Parkhouse on certain infinite series. Alan Sykes puts Dyalog APL to work to get a class library for statistics. And John McInturff finds J convenient for constructing odd-order magic squares.

Enjoy.

Stephen Taylor