SHARP APL

SHARP APL was an APL implementation offered by I.P. Sharp Associates (IPSA), originally as part of its time-sharing service and later as a stand-alone product. It was split off from STSC's APL*PLUS, which until then had been sold jointly by the two companies. SHARP APL was the source of many developments in flat array theory, driven by Ken Iverson and other APL designers at IPSA.

Releases
A partial list of SHARP's major releases is shown.

Primitive functions
The primitives shown here are those for SHARP APL around 1987, near the end of the decline of time-sharing APL. Some primitives from A Dictionary of APL were added after this, including In, Nubsieve , and Raze , and these appear in SAX.

Scalar
All scalar functions have rank zero.

Numeric types
SHARP originally supported only real numbers using double (8-byte) precision. Numbers were stored in one of three types:
 * Boolean, with one bit per value
 * Integer, with four bytes per value
 * Floating, with eight bytes per value

SATN-40 describes the addition of complex numbers to SHARP APL.

SHARP APL Technical Notes
Features of SHARP APL were documented in "technical notes" issued by IPSA. These notes are numbered following the scheme "SATN-0". Earlier notes typically had no author listed. A pdf collection of SHARP APL Technical Notes is hosted at jsoftware.com, as are html transcriptions of some notes, linked in the table below.