General Correspondence
Vector 4:3, page 8
Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 8
The VECTOR working group welcomes correspondence on any topic affecting the APL community. All letters should be addressed to the Editor, and should indicate whether they are for the general or technical section. (Letters containing APL code will normally be classed as 'technical'.) The editor reserves the right to edit any letter unless the writer states that it is to be published in full or not at all.
I-APL Status Report¶
Dear Adrian,
You will be glad to hear that at last the first version of I-APL is available. It is suitable for learning and teaching but not for commercial work. We discourage attempts to use it commercially and prohibit its sale for direct commercial gain.
We will be sending out order forms around the turn of the year. Would you allow us to include one as an insert in Vector Vol 4 issue 3? The complete package is likely to cost £11 plus post and packing. There will be a 360K disk, an I-APL/PC Instruction Manual (52pp), "An APL Tutorial" by Thomson and Alvord (48pp) and "An APL Encyclopedia" by Helzer (it is a comprehensive reference manual - 308pp). All the books will be available separately and are much cheaper than photocopies. As we encourage copying of the disk there is no need for anyone to buy more than one. All three books have gone to press and the printers promise delivery before 31 December.
The BBC version, ported by Tony Cheal, will be available in early March probably in two stages. The first will be a disk suitable for the Master or BBC B with 32K of sideways RAM. The second will be a pair of EPROMs for any BBC. There are five more ports working which will soon be under test and many others not yet ready for testing.
The next stage of the project is the really difficult one. That is to persuade the educational world to try APL out in earnest. I suggest that everyone keen on the project who has access to a PC or clone should buy a copy of the complete package and offer to demonstrate it to teachers at their local schools. Success is getting them to buy the package and ordering another one to try on the next school.
People who do this should be able to collect reactions and opinions about the product and the workspaces which accompany it. We welcome serious practical suggestions for improvement or additions to the package which your teachers would find valuable, particularly if you can produce these and ensure that the teachers are happy with them before sending them to us. We would be most grateful for any such workspaces which we could circulate on the distribution disk.
In Europe the Danish APLers are leading the way. Their distribution plans are well advanced and they have Kim Andreason's excellent port on the RC Piccoline, the Danish school computer to distribute. The Finnish, Swiss, Swedish, German and Austrian groups are working hard at ports and translations of the texts. Several groups are eagerly awaiting the ports on the CBM 64, the Sinclair/Timex Spectrum or the Apple II. The project would be very glad to hear from groups willng to work at distribution in other countries.
Now that distribution has begun we suggest that supporters of the project contribute first to their own national distribution effort. In the UK this is being handled by I-APL Ltd, but in case we are accused of selfishness I should tell you that the project will not use internationally contributed funds to pay for UK-specific distribution. We have borrowed to pay for the printing of the texts and will probably have to do so again to print the Instruction Manuals for other versions. If sales are good we will be able to repay the loan.
The UK mailing list now consists of well over 800 and about 150 of these are teachers. It costs us about £200 to send out a mailshot to everyone. I had the good news this week that SigAPL are making a further contribution to project funds to help with distribution.
We are very grateful to all our contributors and particularly to SigAPL and the British APL Association - the largest contributor of all - please don't stop now, when the light at the end of the tunnel is getting really bright.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony Camacho
[address omitted]
... and on behalf of Ed Cherlin, Norman Thomson, Howard Peelle, Dave Ziemann and Paul Chapman.