Printer Support from QL-APL

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 10

Several months ago I bought MicroAPL’s interpreter for the Sinclair QL and I have been using it to explore the possibility of using APL in my work as a maths teacher. I have also acquired a copy of the I-APL interpreter for use in school. Norman Thomson and Anthony Camacho have both been very helpful, answering enquiries and sorting out problems, and the articles by Alan Sykes in Education Vector have been most instructive.

It would be a great help to me, and to others learning APL and planning to introduce it into schools, if there was a pool of public domain programs available. Are there any simple APL programs or tutorials available on disk in the BAA library?

The I-APL interpreter has a built-in facility to enable the special APL character set to be printed out on an Epson-compatible dot matrix printer; I wish MicroAPL’s QL interpreter had this feature. MicroAPL have been most helpful, but they obviously cannot afford to give much support to a machine that offers such a small, and shrinking, market. Are there any other users of QL APL who can help me? What I need is some way of printing the APL character set on an Epson-compatible printer (I use a Brother M1009). Other things that would be very useful are a screen dump and some way of transferring workspaces between I-APL and MicroAPL.

Hopefully by next term I will have enough knowledge of APL to enable me to exploit I-APL in my mathematics teaching. With APL, LOGO and symbolic algebra packages available on powerful microcomputers there are many exciting possibilities to be explored in school mathematics.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Angus