I.P. Sharp Associates

I.P. Sharp Associates (IPSA) was the vendor of SHARP APL and a major contributor to the APL community and the flat array model in the 1970s and 1980s. Like its U.S. counterpart STSC, the Canadian IPSA served as a center of APL research, hiring notable interpreter designers and implementers from IBM and starting the careers of many other notable implementors. It also sponsored the IPSA conferences.

IPSA was founded in 1964 by an eight-person team including president Ian Sharp and Roger Moore. Initially a contractor for IBM System/360 programming, the company quickly became involved with APL, with Moore helping to implement APL\360 beginning in 1966. IPSA began to offer its own APL, split off from IBM's implementation and developed jointly with STSC, as part of a timesharing service. IPSA offered this service in Canada while STSC offered it in the United States. Eventually IPSA's offering was named SHARP APL and the language began to diverge from STSC's APL*PLUS. As timesharing usage began to decline, IPSA offered SHARP APL as a stand-alone product in 1980; it would later evolve into SAX, SHARP APL for Unix.

Employees

IPSA's roster of APL designers and implementors included cofounder Roger Moore, former IBM employees Ken Iverson and Dick Lathwell, and new implementors Roger Hui, Eric Iverson, Arthur Whitney, and Bob Bernecky. After it was acquired in 1987, many IPSA employees went on to create other commercial efforts: Hui joined both Iversons to develop J as part of Jsoftware, Whitney designed A+ and later founded Kx Systems and then Shakti to sell K, and Bernecky created the APEX APL compiler. Two other employees, Morten Kromberg and Gitte Christensen, founded the APL-based company Insight Systems, and later took over management of Dyalog Ltd.