Auwvax.248
net.misc
utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!npois!cbosg!cbosgd!cbosg!harpo!uwvax!greg
Thu Mar 11 12:42:15 1982
APL news group proposal
I would like to start a news group on the programming language APL.
Contributions of all sorts would be welcome -
   1) interesting APL techniques and idioms
   2) humorous/serious anecdotes
   3) bug reports and comments on various APL systems
   4) synopses of research results relating to APL
   5) anything not covered by areas (1) to (5) (thank you, Bertrand.)

Please comment to net.misc or mail me if you are interested.  If sufficient
interest exists, I will make this a news group.  If not, I will spare
disk drives scattered across the North American continent and not do so.

To start things off, here are some problems that I've noticed with the APL
interpreter we have on a VAX running UNIX:
1) There seems to be no way to get quote characters into character strings.
   The usual pair of adjacent quotes ( 'you don''t say?' ) doesn't work.
2) transpose, and presumably others in that family, doesn't work on empty array
   ( 3 0 <--> rho transpose 0 3 rho 0 )
3) encode doesn't work on anything but scalars.
4) execute doesn't print anything out or return anything but an empty vector.
   ( 2 2 <--> rho execute '2 2 rho iota 4' )
5) 'take conformability error' if the left side is larger than the length of
   the right -  5 take iota 3  should be  1 2 3 0 0
6) inner product doesn't work if you try to combine a matrix and a vector:
   ( 3 4 R iota 12 ) + . * iota 4    should work.

				Greg Johnson
				uwvax!greg, greg@uwisc
				UW-Madison Comp. Sci. Dept.
				1210 W. Dayton
				Madison, WI  53706