info on APL

[jdb%s1-c at sri-unix.UUCP]

I have been out of touch for about six months, so perhaps my perception
of the current state of affairs with regard to APL is no longer
accurate.  Nonetheless...

The APL which Berkeley distributed with 4BSD and 4.1BSD is derived
from a program originally written by Ken Thompson at Bell, many years
ago (to the best of my knowledge, sometime before V6).  This program
was part of an early distribution tape.

Another variant of the same program followed another path and ended
up at Purdue University.  There it was modified, first by Jim Besemer
and later by me, under the guidance of Dr. Anthony P. Reeves.  The
Purdue version is not wholly a superset of the version distributed
in 4BSD (in particular, it does not use the two-character mnemonics to
represent APL characters), but it is generally more robust.  It also
will run on both (I&D) PDP-11's and VAXes (workspaces are not directly
interchangeable but can be converted by a utility program).  [I once
ran it on 32/V, but principally developed it for 4.[01]BSD.]

Until last fall we were distributing APL to anyone with a UNIX source
license >= V6 (it no longer runs on vanilla V6 but it contains no
V7 code of Bell origin).  Since then, both Dr. Reeves and I have left
Purdue.  Dr. Reeves expressed an interest at that time in continuing
the development of APL at his new location, Cornell University.  If
you are interested in a copy you should contact him; he can be
reached at

	...!decvax!cornell!reeves
	reeves at cornell
	(607) 256-4296

In answer to the original question, the Purdue version does provide
some low-level I/O functions for UNIX I/O to/from files.  By combining
these with the "execute" and "format" functions you can perform ASCII
I/O.  (Alas, these facilities are not as complete as I'd like; however,
at the time I was working on APL there were more important things to
do [such as my thesis]).

				John Bruner
				Lawrence Livermore Laboratory
				(415) 422-0758
				...!decvax!decwrl!mordor!jdb
				jdb at s1-c