Impressions of APL 88

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 58

APL 88 was held from 1-5 February 1988 in Sydney, Australia. Delegates were accommodated in three students’ halls: International House, Wesley College and St. Andrews College. Ordinary sessions were held in three lecture theatres in the Wilkinson building of the School of Architecture. Plenary sessions were held in the Stephen Roberts lecture theatre, five minutes’ walk across Victoria Park.

[Photograph: two delegates beneath a banner reading “Welcome to APL 88”.] The Entrance to the School of Architecture

The Wilkinson building is modern and the lecture theatres are smart, comfortable and air-conditioned. (February in Australia is the equivalent of August in the northern hemisphere and Sydney is about the same distance from the equator as Morocco. It was hot. It rains quite often so the grass stays green and the parks beautiful.) There is also a large lobby where tea, coffee and orange juice were served, and a large open space for the exhibition and hospitality suites. The software exchange, with several PCs, was set up in a room off the lobby.

There were 46 presentations of submitted papers, four panels, two plenary panels, a plenary for SigAPL, a special invited plenary on crystallography, and opening and closing plenaries. The day before the conference there was an Education Day. Over thirty Australian secondary teachers turned up and were addressed by Ken Iverson, Howard Peelle, a teacher from a Japanese school, Makoto Kikkawa, and the I-APL team introducing the hands-on sessions. Each teacher went away with “An APL Tutorial”, “An Encyclopedia of APL” and, if they had access to a PC, I-APL/PC and its instruction manual. The hands-on sessions were held in the Madsen building by courtesy of Professor Ken Sinclair.

[Photograph: delegates in tiered seats.] Joey Tuttle, Eugene McDonnell, Rob Hodgkinson, Mel Chapman, John Sullivan, Donald MacIntyre, Howard Peelle, Dave Weintraub, George Cherlin. Part of the Audience at a Plenary Session

Below you will find short descriptions of some of the presentations in APL 88 proper. The papers themselves may be read in the proceedings – available from SigAPL. There are also longer reports of sessions not covered by printed papers. The selection depends on the VECTOR reporters’ choice of sessions to attend.

The Conference committee had organised a smart yellow satchel with green APL 88 logo and green binding for each delegate, with a name tag to help avoid inadvertent exchanges, stuffed with:

a welcome from Sydney APL UG
the programme
the proceedings and photocopies of some extra papers
an envelope with tickets for T-shirt, theatre and banquet
a BAA leaflet
an I-APL newsletter (no. 6)
an APL 89 badge
a SigAPL leaflet
maps of Sydney and the University
leaflets about public transport and tours
a pad of paper and a pen

Vector 4.3 arrived too late to be stuffed in the satchels but there was a copy for every delegate as promised.

The T-shirts were yellow and of three sizes. The APL 88 logo was printed in green on the front and the size in APL on the back. The three sizes were ‘min over iota zero’, ‘omega domino omega to the power zero’, and ‘power max over iota zero’.

The tickets were for the Everest Theatre at the Seymour Centre, next door to International House, and the play was ‘Faces in the Street’ – a dramatisation by Frank Hardy, himself a maverick, of the life of Australia’s radical socialist poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922). ‘Faces in the Street’ is also the title of Lawson’s most famous poem, about the poverty and despair of life in Sydney written in 1888 – another centenary. The plot was somewhat contrived (the principal character was a mental patient who thought he was Lawson) to allow the distinction between fact and fiction to be blurred – this may have helped with the dramatisation but it reduced the value of the evening as a lesson in Australian history. Nevertheless it was an ideal subject for our group, most of whom were visiting Australia for the first time.

The banquet was in the refectory of the Holme building, which is decorated with murals by Lo Schiavo. One of them, “Mankind”, is the largest mural in the southern hemisphere – it runs the whole length of the refectory which must be over a hundred feet. The setting was magnificent and the banquet itself matched the setting. There was a display of cold food with glazed turkeys, hams, huge decorated fish, a cornucopia of fruits and gateaux, and a centrepiece which was a three-foot-high seahorse modelled in ice at the top of a small hill of crabs, lobsters and prawns. It not only looked delicious, it was. While we ate, a consort of early musical instruments played. It was led by Peter Petocz who had also presented a paper on Monday. The SigAPL outstanding achievement award was awarded to Allen J. Rose, APL 89 and 90 were advertised, Linda Alvord appealed for us to draw back into the fold APLers who had allowed their membership to lapse, and money was raised for I-APL distribution in Australia by auctioning some of Donald McIntyre’s models of regular solids (Phil Benkard made a convincing auctioneer) and raffling the master and first copy of I-APL/PC. I have never attended a better banquet; it will be remembered as outstanding for many APL conferences.

Overall the conference ran smoothly. From Warren Julian’s opening to the final paper by Ken Iverson nothing significant went wrong. The display equipment always worked, the refreshments were always on time and there was even a substantial amount of press coverage, some during and some after the conference. Even the university accommodation and food were acceptable – only the really fussy went out for meals. Those who wanted could go swimming before breakfast or watch the fruit bats (they have wingspans of two or three feet) eating figs from the trees in the park after supper.

Our verdict is that APL 88 was a best buy among APL conferences and that the people who ran it, and the many who helped, deserve our sincere thanks and congratulations.