APL Press Review

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 21

This is the second review of recent articles in the Press that mentioned APL, or might be of interest to the APL community, and covers the period from September to November 1985. Please write and let us know if you find it useful and/or interesting. If anyone sees an interesting article in an unusual publication, the Editor would be pleased to collate the copy.

As we all know, APL does not get a very good coverage in the computer press, let alone publications of a more general nature. I was able to find a mention of APL in 11 articles. On the face of it this might not sound too bad, however over half of them only mention it as on example in a list (usually long, if it includes APL) of computing languages. Viz:

Brian Glassup in Infomatics (November) mentions it as one of the ‘plethora’ in his article ‘Educating expert systems’.
PC Week (13th November) considers it a more specific (?) high level development language than, say, Fortran in ‘Rivals for their own say’.

Boris Allan in Datalink (11th November) uses APL as the example of a ‘functional programming language’ in ‘Setting out a style for languages of the future’.

Systems International (November) has an article on ‘Micro Languages’ by Tony Hetherington et al that includes it in a ‘Babel’. The rest of the article does say a bit more about Fortran, Cobol and Pascal but then suddenly produces a ‘suitability for application’ table, with no explanation of how it was derived, of 14 languages by 15 so-called applications. Needless to say, APL is one of the also-rans (it does beat Basic and Cobol by one point, though). The most versatile languages, with almost double the number of points that APL scraped, were Ada and Modula-2 (?). I am afraid it greatly irritated me.

In Datalink’s Main Feature (2nd September) Russell Jones reviewed an Inbucon survey on fourth generation languages (‘Cure-alls they’re not’) and found that APL had been mentioned as one of the three most popular in the mini and mainframe market.

Finally, leaving the best until last, in another Main Feature in Datalink (11th November), Christine Guilfoyle wrote an article entitled ‘No hope for Esperantists’. Although APL was initially described as ‘academic’, it was then one of four described in some detail (RPG, PL/1, Assembler being the others!). APL actually got 18 column-inches, one third devoted to the usual comments (‘a scientific and mathematical cult language that gobbles up machine resources like nobody’s business’) produced by writers who have never bothered to actually try out the language. But, to counteract this view, two thirds was devoted to Romilly Cocking riding to the rescue, putting forward a far more constructive point of view (we even got a half page colour picture of him – at night). Well done Romilly!

A more natural mention of APL is made in the IBM System User in October where Sue Jelley has an article, ‘Push the power back to the people’, describing the development of the services provided by Information Centres.

The most heart-warming article in this collection of cuttings is that written by J.D. Matthews in the September O.R. Newsletter, entitled ‘Keeping Pace with change using APL’. Did you know that knowledge of APL is a prerequisite for the Statistics course at Swansea University?

There are two articles, under the heading of New Product News, mentioning APL. Computer Weekly (28th November) announced that MicroAPL had bought the rights to the software code for APL68000 and were not only planning to introduce it on some of the new pcs but were also going to produce an upgrade in the APL2 direction. I have no doubt that the article in Datalink (11th November?), describing the APL compiler that Cocking and Drury will be distributing, raised a guffaw around the country! I always thought that the main benefit of compiled code was that it ran faster? It seems that this new compiler is different – it ‘doubles execution time’! In the previous Press Review David Preedy mentioned the lack of coverage of APL85. I believe David Ziemann was responsible for providing the picture of APL users singing ‘APL Blossom Time’ that appeared in the GIGO column of Datalink (4th November). A few highlights of the lyrics were also given. Can anyone send us the full epic? We would be happy to publish it, we might even run a competition to expand it.

To end, I would like to draw the readers attention to ‘Living C – Personal’ written by Dick Pountain in Byte (November). My eye was drawn to the last column – ‘Perhaps the most interesting application of Living C, though, is the maintenance of existing programs. C does not encourage the writing of readable programs, but now you can always understand how someone else’s otherwise obscure code works by animating it and watching the bouncing ball’! It seems that you can display the source code on the screen and the cursor hops around pointing to the statement currently being executed, much in the fashion of those bouncing balls that traced out song lyrics for sing-alongs. Does any enterprising soul out there fancy emulating it for APL?