The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

July 1991

Editor Alan Sykes

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.8 No.1. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Anthony Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Dr Alan Sykes,
c/o European Business Management School
Swansea University
Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP
Wales, UK

Editorial¶

by Alan Sykes

Welcome once again to Education Vector. This editorial will be my last as editor of Education Vector. It seems incredible that I have been doing the job for three years now. Tempus Fugit! It is with some regrets that I relinquish my job - on the one hand I have very much enjoyed the challenge of writing articles designed to encourage the use of APL; on the other hand, it does take time, an all too precious commodity. In any case, fresh ideas and enthusiasm generated by change is generally a good thing.

So I take this opportunity to thank all my readers who have expressed appreciation of Education Vector, including those that have sent their contributions. (See for example the Letters section this issue.) In addition I must thank Adrian Smith for his dedication in type-setting so superbly all that I have submitted, not to mention exercising his prerogative, both as type-setter and extraordinarily-capable-APL programmer, to include apposite ‘extras’ from time to time! Thanks too to all members of the British APL Association for allowing a very amateur APL programmer to benefit from close contact with the APL professionals.

What of the future for Education Vector? First of all its editorship is in the very capable hands of my friend and colleague Alan Mayer (so only half the name has changed in the new editorial address!) Secondly, I am sure the British APL Association will continue to send out copies of Education Vector to those on the mailing list. If you are a reader abroad, wish to continue receiving it, and have not yet written to me, please do so as soon as possible, so that in the near future the Association can up-date its lists accordingly.

If, however you wish to keep up to date with a somewhat wider spectrum of APL activities, may I recommend that you become a member of the Association and receive those ‘glossy’ quarterly copies of VECTOR (see Letters). (A lot of the content of VECTOR is technical, and perhaps writers of articles for VECTOR ought to be a little more careful to avoid the danger of being unnecessarily exclusive by using too much unexplained jargon. Nevertheless, it does represent remarkable value for money - there is no other APL journal to beat it. In addition the recent introduction of Random Vector, which reports on the APL Statistics Library Project, should be of interest to many readers of Education Vector.)

But back to Education Vector. To fill sixteen pages of interesting APL once a quarter is not an easy task. But it is worthwhile, as many of the letters I have received attest. Please find that extra bit of time to write up your latest APL activities for inclusion in these columns. APL professionals too have their role to play - not by using its columns just to demonstrate how clever they are, but by providing helpful hints on programming methods and idioms, tools for readers to make use of, and in short, encouragement for those of us who are still in the early stages of learning a language that has so much to offer, both in terms of intellectual enjoyment and practical usefulness.