ASL News and Status - December 1990

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 35

I would like to start by reviewing the way in which the ASL project is organised. It should be stressed that with the exception of the part-time input of our Programmer (see below), all the effort put into ASL is done on a voluntary basis. Whilst it is extremely gratifying to have the willing help and assistance of so many people, they all have other things to do and this does impose different timescales to full-time commercial projects.

The Programmer¶

There are two main ways in which ASL is funded by the BAA. One is by running working conferences or workshops like the one just held in Swansea. The other is by paying for a part-time programmer. She is Tuks Gillespie, who has substantial experience in APL programming and is proving an extremely valuable member of the project. Organising the effective use of Tuks’ time is the responsibility of the Manager, Jake Ansell.

Working Parties¶

The actual specification and planning of ASL software is done by Working Parties,who liaise with the Management Team and the Programmer through Jake Ansell. One key way in which you can support ASL is by serving on Working Parties. So why not write to Tony O’Hagan (address above) and tell him which aspects of statistical software you would be interested in helping to develop? Is there an area of statistical methods in which you have a great interest or expertise? Are you keen to help with the graphics, the numerical algorithms or other utilities that will serve the statistical functions? Or could your experience in developing large non-statistical APL systems be valuable to us in our general operations, or in managing our growing library of functions? WRITE NOW, please.

Shelves and Volumes¶

ASL is a library, which suggested the word “shelf” to cover a collection of functions dealing with a common subject area. Thus, there will be a Regression Shelf. Within a Shelf, there is a smaller unit called a “volume”. A volume is a coherent group of functions that are released together. So shelves grow by the addition of a volume at a time. There is a shelf called the Bottom Shelf, concerned with low-level functions that are likely to be usable both directly and within higher shelves.

The Official Launch¶

We currently plan to launch ASL by the simultaneous release of three volumes at a special meeting of the BAA on 22 March 1991. The first software to be released will be:

Bottom Shelf Volume 1, Basic Statistics
Bottom Shelf Volume 2, Basic Graphics
Regression Shelf Volume 1, Generalised Linear Models.