NARS

STSC's APL*PLUS Nested Arrays System (acronymized NARS, from "Nested Array Research System") was the first commercial nested APL implementation. Drawing on work by Jim Brown, Trenchard More, and development manager Bob Smith, NARS introduced a new set of functions for working with arrays that contain arrays, as well as many new operators such as Power. It was heavily influenced by Ken Iverson's 1978 paper "Operators and Functions", and as a result features the first implementations of many primitives that were later added to SHARP APL and J under Iverson's direct supervision.

Primitives
NARS was an extension of APL*PLUS, which used the APL.SV primitive set, except for Execute. Only new primitives are shown here, with existing cases in parentheses.

Functions
Additionally, Index Generator was extended to allow a vector argument, Replicate and Expand were extended to allow integer left arguments, and Reshape was extended to allow an empty right argument (using fill elements).

Operators
The Outer Product operator was renamed "Function Table".

Other functionality

 * Stranding and stranded assignment syntax were added.
 * The primitive array Zilde was introduced.
 * The assignment arrow  with nothing to the left was used to indicate Sink, which prevented display of a value.
 * Defined functions were extended to allow an ambivalent case.
 * Choose indexing was added.