APL Phrasebook

Preamble

At the October BAA London meeting DickBowman brought along the materials for the APL Phrasebook project.

This is an attempt to define the variations, both in primitive functions and in programming idioms, between the various implementations of APL.

From the materials we have, the project went on for some considerable time before lapsing into a torpor, but with the reviving interest in APL and increased activity on the discussion fora (sorry, can't bring myself to write "forums") from so called "newbies" it looks as if the project is worth resuscitating.

I've browsed through the materials & they fall into two types: minutes & overviews of the project itself; lists of definitions, idioms and phrases from the different vendors.

We have sections from: Sharp APL (and SAX) Dyalog; IBM; and one document from APL*PLUS (as it was then). There is nothing from MicroAPL unfortunately, nor from any of the minor "flavours" of APL (mainly now defunct). There are also some documents which compare the variants and on these we get some J (I "think" but I might be wrong, both Ken Iverson & Donald Orth are listed as being on the team to supply information about J).

The documents are in effect prototypes of the phrasebook, so they were created over a period of some years and repeat themselves in different versions. Because of the time lapse between versions and change of personnel involved in the project, the style & layout vary from one iteration to another.

As a start I've divided the documents into related groups & I think we should concentrate one one group at a time. Because of the time which has lapsed since the creation of these materials, we don't have any electronic sources. So the first task, if we are to collaborate properly on this, is to scan them in and convert to a properly editable and distributable source.

The APL Wiki is the obvious respository, especially during this unstructured initial phase.

Scanning the documents as JPG or equivalent is easy enough, but can we use an OCR package to render APL characters? Some of the documents are less legible, being photocopies of line-printer output. Some sections are written or amended by hand, though mostly in a large script, which is clear enough for the human eye, of not the electronic one.

I intend to scan in one section today, I think the "Extended Primitive Functions" group listed below

Watch this space...

Index of Documents

I've gone for a count of "sides" as many documents are double sided photocopies or prints.

there are 236 sides in total. I could be argued that we don't need to scan group 1 & that the index in group 2 can be generated, which you reduce the target to 180 sides.

Some of the material repeats, but the most important (or is it just legible?) section of 104 sides has been scanned & must now be converted to editable form in some way. I'll ask at the BAA London meeting about what to do with the scanned images.

Group 1 Minutes and Guidelines

These provide some guidelines for the original purpose of the project, but they don't directly contain materiials for the phrasebook

32 sides in total

Group 2 Sundry

Although of interest these are collections from outside the project it seems, also the "Bowman" (is that Dick?) paper seems to be an attempt to kick start a format for the comparisons. The Permuted Index can probably be generated by, say, the Wiki itself.

47 sides in total.

Group 3 Summary Comparisons

12 sides in total.

Group 4 Phrases

145 in Total

• The "Extended Primitive Functions" APL characters are handwritten

• The "Extended Primitives Master List" might be the same as that in group 3, but is undated. The Draft & these two list need comparing & reducing to a single list.

• The APL*Plus Extended Primitives list is a single page, produced in a different format to the other three.
• Sax Primitives is a single, undated sheet again of a different format.

List of Dialects in Document of 18 Dec 1990

• Core APL - APL\360, VS-APL APL-SV
• Sharp APL (SAX)
• APL Plus - MF, 386, PC, Unix, VMS
• APL2 - MR, PC/386, RS6000
• Dyalog
• APL68000
• DEC APL
• Burroughs
• Hewlett Packard
• Honeywell (Xerox)
• UNIVAC
• CDC
• Data General