News from Sustaining Members

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 11

HMW Computing Limited¶

HMW Computing Limited continue to develop and market "4XTRA" our front end Foreign Exchange Dealing and Position Keeping System.

We have been extremely busy over the last six months and have released yesterday (Monday 3rd September) the latest release of 4XTRA into a major UK Bank. The system is supporting about 130 traders and is fully integrated into the banks existing systems.

Excellent teamwork and professionalism has been displayed by the HMW personnel involved in this project and we are happy to report a successful conclusion of this phase of work.

Following on from this we are about to start major developments of the product and hope to release news to Vector soon.

If you would like to see the latest 4XTRA system, we are exhibiting at a number of exhibitions and would be please to offer invitations or if you prefer a demonstration can be arrange at our offices or on your own premises.

Our general APL consultancy business is doing well given the general recession in the industry and a number of our clients have had major system delivered over the last few months. However, maintenance and development of existing system continues to be our major on going work load. We encourage APL users who are looking for help to use our services as we can supply consultants with proven track records of success. Naturally our Employment Agency can supply permanent people if you prefer.

APL People Limited¶

Efforts continue to build up our overseas business in readiness for the coming of the European 'open market' in 1992. We have already successfully placed people in jobs in Spain, Sweden, Luxembourg, France, Toronto and Belgium and were looking for APLers keen to work in Saudi just before the 'Gulf crisis' blew up!

We currently have a number of excellent APL consultants available for assignments either in the UK or abroad, and would like to hear from any companies who are having difficulty in finding people of a high enough calibre for their needs. I can invariably find someone with the right skills, no matter what the problem (or location!)

We also plan to set up a 'help-line' offering free advice to companies experiencing problems with the development or conversion of systems in APL. Between them, our consultants have worked in all industry sectors - some have over 20 years' experience in the use of the APL language - and are able to advise on any aspect of systems development, large or small.

Dyadic Systems Ltd¶

Dyadic is pleased to announce Version 6.1 of Dyalog APL which will initially be available for DOS/386 but will also be ported to the Unix implementations of the product. Version 6.1 contains the following enhancements:

Browsing/Editing Variables¶

You can now open a display/edit window for a variable. The window is opened in the same way as for functions and operators, i.e. by using )ED or by positioning the cursor over the name and pressing the <EDIT> key. The appearance of the variable in the window is exactly as if it were displayed using standard output ignoring ⎕PW. If you subsequently change the value of the variable, the display changes accordingly. This is particularly useful for debugging when using the TRACE facility because you can watch the value of one or more variables change as you step through a program.

If you skip to the window using <TAB> you can scroll the data vertically or horizontally to browse a large array. ANY array can be displayed, but in this release only certain types of array can be edited. This restriction will be lifted in later releases. Additional colour parameters may be specified to distinguish between variables and functions and between "editable" and "non-editable" arrays.

⎕ED¶

A new system function, ⎕ED, has been introduced to permit the browsing and/or editing of variables and functions/operators under program control.

New Colour Scheme¶

In response to criticism in this journal and elsewhere, a new default colour scheme has been introduced for Release 6.1. However, in the sure knowledge that "you cannot please all of the people all of the time", Dyadic expects the new scheme to be as much a source of amusement and debate as the old one.

Cocking and Drury Ltd¶

At the beginning of August Cocking & Drury became STSC's PLUS*DEALER for the UK. This is a new programme launched by STSC for their major dealers - there are only 5 world-wide.

One of the benefits of this new status is that it gives us access to consistently better discount rates on APL*PLUS PC purchases and this has helped us REDUCE PRICES on all the APL*PLUS PC products - see Product News for details.

STSC itself has gone through a major reorganisation which has separated APL*PLUS and STATGRAPHICS into an 'Analytical Software Division' which will enable STSC to continue to commit itself to the further development of APL*PLUS products.

The dealers at STSC's International Dealer Conference held in Windsor at the end of August put forward a number of suggestions about what these developments should be!

Products announced at the Dealer Conference for release in the near future included APL*PLUS UNIX Version 5 which will include a Version for the IBM RS6000; APL*PLUS PC Version 10; Statgraphics Version 5 and a new Statgraphics 386 product.

Here at Cocking & Drury we have agreed with one of our clients that we will develop and market a product originally written for their internal use. The UTILITY DELIVERY SYSTEM is a set of facilities for the management of APL utilities in the APL*PLUS mainframe environment (and in the networked APL*PLUS II System Version 3). It allows developers of APL utilities to create and maintain Utility Files and APL application developers to deliver Utility File based utilities into running applications. For further information contact us on 071 436 9481.

We have also said 'Au-revoir' to Dave Ziemann who - after 13 years work - has decided to take a year out to see the world. We look forward to his return in 1991.

MicroAPL Ltd¶

In the last issue of Vector we announced the launch of our new APL - APL.68000 Level II. The official launch took place at APL90, and we have prepared a special issue of MicroAPL news which covers the development and features of APL.68000 Level II. Most readers of Vector Should have received their copy of MicroAPL news issue 13 by now - if you haven't, contact us for a free copy.

We made use of the gap between publication deadlines for Vector 7.1 and the launch of APL.68000 Level II to improve the specification of the product by including user-defined operators in the first full release - version 1.1. Publishing the full specification here would take more space than we are allowed, so I will confine myself to saying that we have now implemented all the key features of APL2 - nested and mixed arrays; user-defined operators; selective specification. In addition we have added a whole host of new system functions and system variables.

At APL90 we showed APL.68000 Level II running on the NCR Tower, the Apple Macintosh, Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST. By the time we went to Copenhagen we had produced versions of APL.68000 Level II for all the major systems that run APL.68000 Level I (as the original product is now called) - the multi-user Unix and Mirage versions and the single-user Mac, Amiga and ST versions.

We have now begun to ship the first sets of APL.68000 Level II. Prices are published elsewhere in this issue of Vector. Users of APL.68000 Level I (as the original product is now called) - can upgrade to Level II at a special price.

Now that we are publicly involved with APL2, we have extended the scope of our training programme to include an introduction to APL2. We have already been running APL*PLUS II training courses for some time now but we feel that our new APL2 courses should be of particular interest to anyone using APL2 in any of its implementations (APL2/370, APL2/PC and APL.68000 Level II). In common with our APL*PLUS II courses, we assume some basic APL knowledge on the part of attendees (for example as might be obtained on our Beginners and Intermediate courses). The dates of the next few scheduled courses are printed in Vector and if you would like more details please contact us. We are finding that more and more clients are asking us to prepare 'custom' training courses for them which are tailored to reflect their own in-house needs.

Finally, our APL*PLUS users will be delighted to hear that we are now shipping APL*PLUS II version 3.0 and upgrades from earlier versions are also available.

I.P. Sharp Associates Limited¶

I.P. Sharp Associates Limited has been renamed REUTER:FILE Ltd with effect from July 1, 1990. I.P. Sharp Associates, headquartered in Toronto, Canada was acquired by Reuters Holdings PLC of London, England in June, 1987. The Reuter:file companies form part of the newly established Reuters Historical Information Division which provides high quality software products, and text and numeric information products to the financial and business communities throughout the Reuter worldwide organization.

Compass R&D Ltd (neé MetaTechnics Systems Ltd)¶

Last year MetaTechnics merged with the COMPASS group of companies, a world-wide group with offices in Scandinavia, Switzerland, UK, USA and West Germany. The group provides efficiency and cost analysis studies to IT and senior management.

The group started in 1980 and MetaTechnics has been connected with COMPASS since 1985 having designed and imolemented the present generation of COMPASS software - mostly in APL*PLUS/PC.

The main product of the group is DC COMPASS which is a management tool for improving the overall efficiency of clients Data Centre operations, based on comparitive analysis. The system uses a model which contains over 2000 separate quality and cost measures and a database of over two hundred companies.

Since merging with COMPASS and in addition to software and product development we have become responsible for all central support and services and worldwide database administration.

To reflect our changing role we changed our name in June 1990 to COMPASS R&D Ltd and because of more staff have moved premises to the Surrey Research Park adjacent to Surrey University.

We are constantly developing new products and have recently announced Network COMPASS which performs comparitive analysis on the cost and efficiency of SNA Networks. Current projects include development of new models, simulation techniques and merging the data centre and network projects. We are planning to move to a second generation APL and are currently evaluating the contenders.

We will continue to support the BAPLA and help to promulgate the use of APL to the data processing world at large.

If you require further information about COMPASS services please contact John Stembridge or David Toop at the address on the back of Vector.