British APL Association News

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 9

How should we present APL at our meetings? From the earliest days of APL it has been traditional to learn APL hands-on, so it has been a pleasure at the first two meetings of this year to have hands-on demonstrations in front of a big screen. Tracing execution with the active functions displayed in windows is a delightful concept that needs to be experienced rather than read or heard about, and when I watched this at the January meeting I could not help feeling excited about computing.

Watching it all happening under the fingers of an intrepid speaker is an exhilarating experience from which APL can be caught as well as taught, so the committee are taking steps to have a projector regularly at the monthly meetings. The extra cost of having one is quite substantial but we need to maintain a very high standard at our meetings to justify the audience's time. We want to increase the numbers of people attending and to this end we shall be publicising the meetings in Education Vector which is sent out to the 1600 people on the I-APL mailing list. Average attendance at the last few meetings has been about 40.

Lucky for those who live in London! On 19 October Adrian Smith will be hosting a regional meeting of the Association at Rowntrees in York.

We are having difficulty knowing what sort of conference to organise. We have offered to host APL92 and provisionally booked conference facilities at York University, but SIGAPL have failed to respond formally to our offer. Unofficially we hear they are unenthusiastic about the idea. We have had to cancel our booking at York but decided at the March committee meeting we should run a conference in 1992 anyway without calling it APL92.

The APL Statistics Library proceeds apace: the 'bottom shelf' workspace contains 70 functions and by the end of April there will be a preliminary version ready for interested people to try. The initial version is written for APL*PLUS/PC. Anybody interested in helping with testing should contact David Eastwood, whose phone number is inside the back cover of this Vector.

29 March 1990