The I-APL News

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 29

Problems¶

We are a volunteer organisation and do not expect to be able to match the service standards of the major vendors - but our customers sometimes expect us to! We do not spend money on publicity, relying on what we can get by sending letters and press releases to the magazines. When somebody gets a good letter in a major magazine then I get a flood of letters and spend a few evenings replying to them. When this happens the porter correspondence stops for a few days and APL gets tried by a lot more people.

For example David Piper’s letter (p233 Personal Computer World May 89) produced about two dozen queries and, together with the details I send out, will have induced perhaps a quarter of them to try out I-APL. If you write letters to magazines or could do so please do more of it. The press coverage of APL has been better than ever in the U.K. for the last year or so. Let’s keep it that way.

We caused ourselves considerable extra trouble by issuing the BBC version with two bugs in it. The second bug came to light the day after all the letters about how to cure the first bug had gone out and so I had to do almost the same again. The current versions have no known bugs. Everyone who we know bought a faulty version has been written to and anyone who has a faulty version may get it exchanged for the cost of the postage.

There are two mistakes we know about in the manual:

IAPL/E on the Archimedes does not send the APL font to an EPSON FX printer.

IAPL B is necessary on a BBC B or Master to get APL output (using EPSON graftrax compatible graphic output).

Progress¶

We are making steady sales and people are still working on ports to other machines. Ed Shaw and Rolf Levenbach are working together on the Apple ][ and Drs Ian Clark and Edwin Ashworth may do a Mac. Emmanuel Roche is working on the Amstrad word processors and Geoff Robinson on the Transputer (on a Bucon board which is a PC add-on).

We are still looking for porters. In particular we would like to find a porter or a group who would collaborate to produce a port for the Commodore CBM64. This is the most important of the machines common in schools that is not progressing as we would like.

We have received camera-ready copy for the second edition of ‘An Encyclopedia of APL’ by Garry Helzer. By the time you read this it will be in the hands of the printer. We have as good as sold out of the first edition of 1000 and as the second edition is laser printed and will be a better-looking product, easier to read, we think it worth doing a larger print run so that we can hold the price. Who, in 1986, would have thought I-APL would last long enough for us to be boasting that we have never had a price increase!

Among the many teachers who have bought a copy of I-APL, most of them BBC or Archimedes users, there are a few that have become enthusiasts for APL overnight as it were. We would very much like to help them. Last year the British APL Association said it was going to ask people who would be willing to help a teacher with APL to register and to make a list publicly available. I-APL is very keen on the idea. If you too are keen, and especially if you would be one of the volunteers, please let someone on the BAA committee know.

At the risk of being boring I repeat my appeal for teachers who use APL to write down anything they feel would be useful in school. If it is short we can put it in the Education Vector; if it is long we can publish it as a pamphlet. Either way other teachers trying APL for the first time may be grateful for the help.