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From: ljdickey@water.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga,comp.lang.apl,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: APL.68000 information request (also for PClones)
Message-ID: <949@water.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 16-May-87 14:13:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: water.949
Posted: Sat May 16 14:13:53 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 17-May-87 01:48:01 EDT
References: <6487@amdahl.UUCP>
Reply-To: ljdickey@water.UUCP (Lee Dickey)
Distribution: world
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 33
Keywords: APL Spencer Organization 68000 STSC
Xref: utgpu comp.sys.amiga:4573 comp.lang.apl:38 comp.sys.atari.st:3285 comp.sys.mac:2935 comp.sys.ibm.pc:3605

I have just returned from APL87 held this past week in Dallas.  Both
companies, Spencer Organization and STSC, were had booths in the
exhibit area.  I agree with comments made previously that STSC has an
excellent product and would add that APL.68000 is also an excellent
product.  Timing tests may sometines be deceiving, but I mention
that on some tests, APL.68000 on the Mac is about 5 times as fast as
STSC's APL*PLUS on the Mac.

The reason for the speed of the APL.68000 is that it is written in hand
crafted assembly code.  A very nice advantage, indeed.  This product
has been around for several years, and has most of the bugs shaken out
of it by now.  (You might have seen it on Wycat for instance.)  The
major marketing thrust now is for the Atari ST, the Mac, and the
Commodore Amiga and the ports wore done in that order.  Hence, claim
the developers, the Amiga version has the best interface of the three.

One representative from STSC claims that they have uniformity across
different versions.  Among others, they offer versions for the Sun, the
IBM PC, and for the Apple Macintosh.  The Mac version seems to be descended
from a product called PortaAPL, previously of Cambridge, Massachussets.
Since STSC claims now to have uniformity, it looks to me as though they
bought the Mac interface and the customer base and plans to expand on
that.

In recent years, STSC has brought many developments to APL, including
nested arrays.  Maybe these things will be coming to to the micro
versions.  The company provides excellent user support.

-- 
 L. J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, University of Waterloo. 
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