Skip to content

Japanese APL on IBM 5550

Vector 2:1, page 69

implementations

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 69

Doubtful transcription

The session printout, mostly in Japanese characters printed by a dot-matrix printer, is reproduced as an image, not transcribed.

One of the more interesting displays at the APL85 exhibition was Japanese APL on the IBM 5550, apparently a mutant IBM PC. The Japanese characters (Kanji, Hirakana or Katakana) are stored internally as a new data type, with two bytes per element, occupying two columns when printed or displayed. They can be mixed with conventional one-byte characters, and can be processed via APL primitives (rho, transpose, indexing etc.) as normal.

The product was produced jointly by the IBM scientific centres at Tokyo and Madrid.

A session on IBM Multistation 5550 日本語 APL Version 1.01 (produced by IBM Tokyo and Madrid Scientific Centers): a matrix of four city names in kanji is reshaped, reversed and transposed; their readings in hiragana are sorted with grade-up to order the cities; random data is formatted as yen; and a function Report prints the sorted table with totals