Gene McDonnell
Eugene Edward McDonnell (October 18, 1926 – August 17, 2010) was an APL implementer and designer, and popularizer of APL and J. He edited the APL Quote-Quad column "Recreational APL" and wrote the "At Play with J" series of articles for Vector journal, and received the Iverson Award in 1987.
McDonnell, a programmer since 1954, joined IBM and first learned about Iverson notation in 1961, and joined Ken Iverson's group at IBM in 1968.[1] He left IBM for I.P. Sharp Associates in 1978, where he worked under Eric Iverson.[2]
Contributions to APL and J
McDonnell suggested the symbol × for Signum and designed the Circle function (○) as a way to unify trigonometric and hyperbolic functions[3]. He designed APL's complex Floor[4] and suggested the extension of Or (∨) and And (∧) to GCD and LCM[5]. He was also involved in the introduction of complex numbers to SHARP APL[6]. His suggestion that zero divided by zero should be zero rather than one[7] was later adopted by J.
In 1988, McDonnell and Ken Iverson developed function train notation, one of the major innovations that spurred the creation of J.
Publications
APL conferences
- Main article: APL conference
- APL73: The variety of definitions of a simple function.
- APL74: The caret functions: Efficient algorithms for scans and reductions of eight Boolean functions.
- APL75: A notation for the GCD and LCM functions.
- APL76: Zero divided by zero.
- APL79: Fuzzy residue.
- APL80: Extending APL to infinity. With Jeffrey Shallit.
- IPSA '80: Commercial Applications for Event Handling.
- IPSA '82: APL as a Functional Programming Language.
- APL85: Promoting APL (panel). With Patricia A. Buteux, Edward M. Cherlin, Percy Feiner, Jim Lucas, Michael Sunday, and Sheryl Winton.
- APL86: A perfect square root routine.
- APL88: Life: Nasty, brutish, and short.
- APL89: Phrasal forms. With K. E. Iverson.
- APL90: APL\?. With Roger K. W. Hui, Kenneth E. Iverson, and Arthur T. Whitney.
- APL91: Tacit definition. With Roger K. W. Hui and Kenneth E. Iverson.
- APL93: From trees into boxes. With David Steinbrook.
SHARP APL Technical Notes
- SATN-40: Complex Numbers. 1981-06-20.
- SATN-45: Language Extensions of May 1983 (with Bob Bernecky, Ken Iverson, Robert Metzger, and J. Henri Schueler). 1983-05-02.
External links
- Eugene McDonnell
- JSoftware paper collection (includes links to Recreational APL and At Play with J articles)
- "At Play With J", updated by the J community
- Eugene McDonnell Quotations and Anecdotes assembled by Roger Hui
References
- ↑ Anon. Candidates for STAPL Offices (excerpt). APL Quote-Quad, Volume 7, Number 4, Winter 1977.
- ↑ Hui, Roger. "Eugene McDonnell Quotations and Anecdotes".
- ↑ McDonnell, Eugene. "The Story of ○".
- ↑ McDonnell, Eugene. "Complex Floor".
- ↑ McDonnell, Eugene. "A Notation for the GCD and LCM Functions".
- ↑ McDonnell, Eugene. SATN-40: Complex Numbers.
- ↑ McDonnell, Eugene. "Zero Divided by Zero".
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