Adin Falkoff

Adin Daniel Falkoff was an APL designer and implementor at IBM and Ken Iverson's primary collaborator in the design of Iverson notation and APL\360. He was the recipient of the first Iverson Award for his role as APL\360 project manager. Falkoff is also credited with coining the name APL based on Iverson's A Programming Language.

Falkoff, who began working at IBM in 1955, began working with Iverson notation soon after Ken Iverson also joined the company in 1960. He used the language for teaching computer science at Yale University, and his first publication involving the notation was "Algorithms for Parallel-Search Memories", in 1962. It was Falkoff who began using APL as a tool for formal hardware specification, as he began specifying IBM's System\360 in 1963. These efforts led to the publication of "A Formal Description of System/360", specifying the operation of the system with long programs written in Iverson notation. His later paper "The APL\360 Terminal System", published jointly with Iverson, was the first description of APL\360.

Publications

 * "Algorithms for Parallel-Search Memories". Journal of the ACM 9:4:488-511 (1962).
 * "A Formal Description of System/360". IBM Systems Journal 3:3:198-262 (1964). With Ken Iverson and Edward H. Sussenguth Jr.
 * APL\360 User’s Manual, IBM Corporation, 1968-08. With Ken Iverson.
 * "The Design of APL" (pdf), IBM Journal of Research and Development 17:4, 1973-07. With Ken Iverson.
 * "The Evolution of APL" (web), ACM SIGPLAN Notices 13:8, 1978-08. With Ken Iverson.
 * A Source Book In APL, APL Press, 1981. With Ken Iverson.
 * "The IBM Family of APL Systems", IBM Systems Journal 30:4, 1991-12.

APL Conferences

 * APL69: APL\ 360 history (web).
 * Colloque APL: A Survey of Experimental APL File and I/O Systems in IBM.
 * APL76: Some implications of shared variables.
 * APL79: A note on pattern matching: Where do you find the match to an empty array?.
 * APL79: Development of an APL standard. With D. L. Orth.
 * IPSA '80: APL Technology: Language Architecture, System Concepts, and Application Methodology.
 * APL81: A pictorial format function for patterning decorated numeric displays.
 * APL82: Semicolon-bracket notation: A hidden resource in APL.
 * APL84: One man’s view of the ideal APL system.