News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 15

APL People Ltd¶

Due to growing demand among our customers, we are pleased to announce that we are now expanding our specialist recruitment agency to cater for the placement of C programmers in addition to those with APL skills.

Over the past year or so, more and more of our customers have begun to ask us if we had anybody on our books with C and APL or just with C alone, and so we became aware that there was a growing need for people with C skills which was not being satisfied. In this time, we also took on a C programmer of our own to work on the software being developed by one of our sister companies (Applied Production Logic Limited), so we know that C is the type of language which fits nicely with APL and is often found in the same sort of environment. This led us inexorably to the conclusion that we should expand our business from being solely APL orientated to include the placement of C staff.

In many ways, placing people with APL skills is similar to placing those with C, in that demand for suitably experienced and qualified people outstrips supply. As many companies have found to their cost, advertising has little or no effect. The way we have cornered the APL market, and the way we intend to do it with C is through our extensive contacts in and knowledge of the market. Most people involved in APL have heard of us and know what we do. They also know that we provide an individual service, quite unlike that of other, bigger agencies. We are always happy to spend time with people advising them on their careers, even if they are not actively looking for another job at that moment.

We are confident that we can achieve the same success with placing C programmers as we have with APL, by building up a reputation for providing sound, reliable advice about the suitability of jobs, and by building up a good knowledge of the market and an excellent reputation as an agency to be trusted. People know that we will do our utmost to match them with jobs which really suit them.

As with APL, we will also be providing consultants in C - we already have a few C contract programmers on our books. Currently, we are working on a number of projects in APL, including further extensions of the IPLS software we are developing in conjunction with British Aerospace, and an exciting new challenge assisting one of the UK's biggest furniture retailers in finding the optimum locations for new stores.

Dyadic¶

Dyadic is pleased to announce Dyalog APL Version 5.1. This is a major new release of Dyalog APL, and contains a number of important enhancements. Foremost among these is the provision of user-definable input/output translate tables. These are designed to support National Language Character sets, to make it easy for users to configure new devices, and to allow a 'soft' keyboard. With this facility, users are even able to define their own atomic vector for special applications. Initially Dyalog APL Version 5.1 is available on the IBM 6150, but it will be ported to all the other systems supported by Dyalog APL in the next few months.

The full-screen data manager, which is modelled on AP126, has also been extended. Several new field types have been added, the number of function keys has been increased to 255, and colour terminals are now fully supported.

Following the delay in SCO CGI, Dyadic expects to be shipping its graphics auxiliary processor with Dyalog APL/386 by early April. CGI provides very powerful graphics capabilities, which coupled with a nested array APL, offer all sorts of new and exciting possibilities.

Dyadic is pleased to announce that as of February 1st, Oasis B.V. has taken over as the exclusive Dyalog distributor in the Netherlands.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

MicroAPL is now releasing Version 7 of APL.68000 on each of the machines it supports. The new version of APL.68000 continues MicroAPL's policy of progressive enhancements and optimizations. On the speed front, the new release includes substantial improvements to mixed monadic and dyadic functions such as rho and catenate, and specific optimization of some commonly used expressions with integer and boolean arguments. New features include improved built-in function/variable editor, and new Quad functions to ease migration from APL*PLUS/PC and APL2 environments to APL.68000.

The new interpreter is being issued initially on the Mirage and Macintosh versions, and other implementations will be issued over the next few months. At the same time as enhancing the APL interpreter itself, we are also making significant improvements to the machine-specific portions of each version. The new Macintosh product shows major enhancements including improved multi-window output handling, user-definable event control, up to four simultaneous function edit windows, full support of vertical and horizontal scroll bars, improved terminal emulator (running in its own window simultaneously with local APL operations), and support for MultiFinder. In addition, a separate version specifically for the 68020-based Mac II is being released, with highly optimized in-line support of the 68881 floating-point processor.

In the UK, MicroAPL is strengthening its applications consultancy department. Projects are undertaken in all major APLs, especially APL*PLUS/PC, VSAPL, APL2 and APL.68000, and the range of application fields covered is increasing all the time.

APL Impetus Ltd¶

Although APL Impetus Ltd was formed only in July 1987, when it was decided that 'Impetus' no longer fitted into Boeing's product strategy, the product has been used by customers for 18 months and the concept goes back to 1976 when TABAPL, its mainframe timesharing predecessor, was first marketed.

When the Impetus development was started in 1984, the challenge was to provide all the functionality of the mainframe product in a machine with only 640K memory. The successful result is based on APL*PLUS/PC, enhanced by 30 or so assembler routines for such crucial activities as formatting, scrolling and panning, and displaying without snow on colour and shaded monitors.

Demonstration diskettes are available for consultants and users who would like to know more about this alternative, APL-based, approach to solving those complex modelling problems which are beyond the scope of spreadsheets.

Mercia Software Ltd¶

It's been another busy quarter at Mercia concentrating on our industrial APLications. Installations of LOGOL now stand at 4 and work is continuing on a number of programming projects for local industry - ranging from lubricants to paper and quality control to product data bases.

STSC products are still best sellers with STATGRAPHICS way out in front - surely the most used piece of APL based software in the world today.

For the APL Purist, STSC will soon be launching the new 80386 based interpreter, which will see the end of 'PC' limitations such as workspace size (providing you can get your hands on the RAM during the great world shortage). Extra features include nested arrays and 1-bit booleans which should please all the PC programmers out there - they've been No. 1 on the list for the last 5 years!

Cocking and Drury Ltd¶

We are pleased to announce the completion of the design phase of our DB2 interface for the APL*PLUS mainframe interpreter, and are hoping to start implementation soon. The project is likely to involve about one and a half work-years of effort in total. Although the development is based on the MVS environment, only one module will need to be replaced in order to produce a version for use with SQL/DS under VM. Little more would be required to adapt it to any database that has an SQL interface, and thus the work could form the basis of a variety of products. A technical article on the design has been submitted to VECTOR, and will appear in VECTOR 5.1.

We have acquired our first copy of PC Focus, with a view to developing a number of hybrid systems. Cocking and Drury are currently helping clients to migrate their applications between APL and Focus.

Cocking and Drury have developed a series of short seminars related to APL which are available for presentation to clients. Topics currently include; APL and Efficiency, APL and C, APL and SQL, APL and Spreadsheets, and a Management appreciation of APL (an empty array joke?). Please contact us if you are interested in any of these topics.

Our involvement in the European APL market is increasing. Not only are we running more in-house APL2 courses, but we are also doing more APL consulting work. In addition, there has been a recent APL*PLUS Compiler purchase in Scandinavia, and APL*PLUS mainframe software is being considered in other sites in Europe.

On the product side, we have had a number of successful Compiler installations, showing excellent financial and performance benefits in each case. Demand for the APL*PLUS mainframe system (enhancements and sharefile) continues. Release 6 of APL*PLUS mainframe includes the new right-bracket command processor; an extremely useful facility which allows you to invoke a non workspace-resident APL program merely by preceding its name by a ']', or by supplying it as a right argument to a new system function. This tool is used to provide programmer services such as workspace searching without the usual baggage of APL functions.

We are currently testing the new APL*PLUS interpreter for the new range of 80386 based machines, including the IBM PS/2 model 80 and the Compaq 386. The new system uses full 32-bit addressing, allowing workspace and variable sizes that are limited only by the installed memory. We are already receiving a number of enquiries.

Statgraphics and APL*PLUS/PC sales continue to flourish, in particular demand for upgrades to APL*PLUS/PC Release 7 has been heavy, mainly due to the extended memory features and the function monitoring facilities.

HMW Computing Ltd¶

HMW Computing Limited is now in its sixth trading year and has been involved in consultancy and bespoke systems work since its inception. The systems designed have usually had a financial flavour and it is without surprise that we now find our market is 90 percent within the banking and finance community. It is worth noting (and perhaps this will be removed by the editor) that our Jackson Structured Programming team has recently left the city for a greenfield banking site. COBOL to our company is not a word we joke about???

HMW has also moved a jump ahead, and this year, every employee has a machine at home (from XEN's for the power crazed to pc's for the unfortunate few). This in theory should have made timesheet and expenses forms return to the office on time but instead has lead to increased floppy disc flow of useful 'goodies' through the post.

Marc Griffiths has recently rejoined us after spending 3 years in the academic world gaining an MSc., teaching and working on an Esprit OA project. He will continue with his PhD and augment our all consuming team of banking specialists and system developers.

This year sees the launch of 4XTRA our front end dealing system for the Banking community. 4XTRA comprises a combination of software packages, for example, FX Dealing and Position Keeping, Arbitrage calculators, Basket Currency Calculators. The system is flexible and designed to be tailored easily. For more information please call Stan Wilkinson on 01-286-7068.