“APL as a Tool of Thought V”: Proceedings of the 5th Annual Professional Development Seminar 24/10/1987

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 47

This is published by NY/SIGAPL. It is available from Renaissance Data Systems, 660 Amsterdam Avenue - Suite 124, New York 10023, USA. The price is 15 US dollars; overseas orders should add 10% to cover postage.

The papers cover a wide variety of topics:

Programming the Connection Machine - Michael J.A. Berry
APL is a Tool of Actuarial Thought - Joe Heise
A Fractal Experimenter's Toolkit - David M. Law
I-APL Tutorial on Mathematical Tools for Interactive Use - Dr Linda Alvord
APL2 and Deductive Logic - David Macklin
The Yorktown Logic Language - Norman Brenner
Rule-Based Inferencing Functions - Jonathon Bard
Statistics with APL - Arthur Castel
Database Structures in APL - Christopher Lett
A Bit of Accounting - Ed Shaw

The theme of the conference was how APL thinking can lend understanding to a variety of fields, and browsing through the papers I found three which are of particular interest. This is not to denigrate the others, I am sure that any other APLer will find a number of articles of interest.

The first paper gives a particularly optimistic foretaste of the future of APL. It deals with the appropriateness of APL to the new generation of highly parallel computers, epitomised by the Connection Machine. This has tens of thousands of processors which all perform the same instructions on differential data elements, i.e. it is a data-parallel machine. To utilise this processing power, new language constructs have been developed for languages such as Fortran and C, whereas APL lends itself quite naturally to this hardware architecture, and indeed the designers of the Connection Machine languages have borrowed heavily from APL. To quote the conclusion:

"The marketplace has shown a distinct preference for languages which fit hardware architecture well over languages which describe algorithms well. There is no reason we should not be able to have both."

The other two papers I found specially interesting were those of Heise and Shaw which illustrate how APL can be used to express concepts in Actuarial Science and Accounting respectively. The conciseness and legibility of the APL expressions for concepts such as Annuity Factors, Survival Probabilities, and Ledger Maintenance certainly give a quick insight into what would otherwise be confusing disciplines.

Other papers offer similar perspectives of non-APL subjects, and the proceedings are very well worth perusing: the reader is bound to learn something and pick up some useful tips.