Introduction to Contributed Articles

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 107

Robert Pullman is President of the Rochester Group Inc., who operate out of Rochester, New York. Robert kicks us off with his ideas on how to solve apportionment problems in APL – how to split a total figure over a number of weighted parts. He uses APL to demonstrate informal proofs of his results as well as to provide us with some useful utility functions in his article “Quick and Dirty Apportionment in APL”.

John Sullivan, a Senior Research Officer with National Westminster Bank in London, is our next contributor. He’s taken a new look at an old problem – how to generate the Fibonacci numbers – and found some insights. His message is “Do the analysis before you write the program”. How we agree!

Paul Chapman is author of VIZ::APL, the 8-bit virtual APL interpreter, and an independent consultant. Paul’s heart-felt plea for naming conventions and documentation standards for APL was rather long for a letter, so we’re including it as a contributed article. Although there are no APL symbols in Paul’s contribution it’s in the technical section of VECTOR because we feel that it should receive special attention from our technical readership.