Letter: I-APL keyboard and beginners

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 30

I have just received my first copy of VECTOR and would like to take the opportunity both to thank the APL community for giving I-APL to education and to support Anthony Camacho’s comments about the choice of keyboard layout adopted by the project. As a total beginner with I-APL I have found much of the keyboard easy to remember without key stickers, using the same aids to memory that he lists.

Incidentally the problem for us beginners isn’t the notation, it’s learning to ‘think’ APL. Even passing acquaintance with procedural languages makes it difficult to unwind the mind from ‘do it one at a time’ and to start thinking ‘do it all at once’. Children will not come to I-APL with any such preconceptions. Perhaps there is a gap in the market for a small book which assumes that the user knows what one does with a computer, e.g. input and verification of data, sorts, selects, etc., but explains how an APLer would do it.

What I would have found very useful with my first VECTOR was a short glossary of APL terms. You may know what APL2 and DYALOG are, and how they extend APL, but it was a mystery to me until I found someone to ask.

I would also be interested to read what people are using APL for. Because I’m involved in education, the examples I know are drawn from that field: an ethnographer using it to process Navaho text in about as much workspace as I-APL provides, a historian using it to convert £ s d to decimal currency, and biologists using it to study bird migration and connectivity of food webs. Given the current emphasis on links between education and industry, demonstrating the commercial importance of APL would seem worthwhile.

Les May