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Reviews Section

Vector 3:3, page 35

reviews APL community

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 35

For the first time, this issue of VECTOR contains a separate section devoted to reviews. This section will contain reviews of books, software and hardware of interest to the APL community at large.

Val Lusmore of APL People has agreed to take on the role of Reviews Editor to coordinate the reviewing process. Whilst the VECTOR team try to cover as wide an area as possible, we cannot reasonably expect to notice every new product. Val would therefore welcome input from three sources:

  • product vendors who are able to make available product for review;
  • ideas for books and products suitable for review;
  • volunteers who would like a chance to evaluate new products and write a review for VECTOR.

All ideas should be sent to:

Val Lusmore,\ APL People Ltd.,\ 17 Barton Street,\ Bath, Avon\ Tel. 0225-62602

This issue covers three book reviews and two APL implementations. The first book review is a double-header; Simon Garland reviews two recent books by Ken Iverson – “Applied Mathematics for Programmers” and “Mathematics and Programming”. Another renowned APL author is Howard Peelle, and his “Introduction to APL” is reviewed by Romilly Cocking. Thirdly Peter Branson gives us his thoughts on reading “A Handbook and Guide for Comparing Computer Languages”, produced by the Research and Education Association of New York.

Paul Chapman is an independent consultant, who is currently working for the I-APL committee writing a free public-domain APL interpreter for small computers. In his copious free time Paul kindly agreed to review MicroAPL’s APL.68000 implementation on the Atari 520 ST.

Finally Martyn Adams of Metapraxis offers some first impressions on the latest release (6.0) of STSC’s APL*PLUS/PC, including a fleeting and evidently unsatisfactory encounter with the new Compaq 386 microcomputer.