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Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!rutgers!clyde!watmath!water!ljdickey
From: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.atari.st,comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: APL for the Mac - is it any good?
Message-ID: <1310@water.waterloo.edu>
Date: 18 Dec 87 02:14:49 GMT
References: <7020@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Reply-To: ljdickey@water.waterloo.edu (Lee Dickey)
Organization: U. of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 65

In article <7020@ut-ngp.UUCP> wmartin@ngp.UUCP (Wiley Sanders) writes:
>
>   I got a mailing from "The Spencer Organization" (sounds like
>a rock promoter!) today advertising the new, reduced price
>for Mac version of their APL68000 - $99. Sounds like a good deal,
>but then, who knows
>what the implementation is like. I would like to elicit responses
>from those who already have APL for the Mac. Email, please, and I
>will summarize and repost. I'm interested in the speed, memory
>capacity, and how they handle that bizarre APL character set.
>  Thanks for your help.

I have watched for your repost, and have not seen one, so please 
forgive me for being so bold as to post for myself.

I have been using APL.68000 for some time now.  My first experience
with it was on an early "Pixel" machine that runs some flavor of UN*X
and one uses "ordinary" APL terminals.  Now, as you have seen,
there are ports of
APL.68000 to micros with bit-mapped screens, such as the Mac, the
Amiga, and the Atari ST.  The APL is *E X C E L L E N T*.  The code is
mature and sound ...  I have been using release 6.xx on my home machine
for over a year now and have found NO BUGS in the APL code.  There are
a few minor problems with the interface to the fancy features of the
micro, but I believe these problems will be solved.  The price used to
be $395, and that was a bargain.  It is now $99, and the company offers
a   FREE   run time license to developers.  It claims to be, and I
believe it to be true, that it is the FASTEST APL available today on a
micro.  Of course the reason for the speed is that it is all written in
assembly code.  That does not help the company do ports to new
hardware, but when they do get it, it is really fast.
As to the memory capacity, it depends on what memory you have and
what accessories you run.  I have a 1 Meg machine run several
accessories and APL.68000 gives me a 735 K workspace.

How does APL.68000 handle the composite (overstrike) characters?  There is a
special keyboard mapping that allows you to get composites by pressing
an alternate key, (the equivalent of another shift key), to get these
things.  That is no problem at all.

For this, APL.68000 uses the same mapping that most modern APLs use;
that is, the keyboard mapping used when a 327x is connected to APL2,
and keyboard mapping used by the most recent releases of WATCOM APL,
STSC APL*PLUS, or IPSA APL, all of which run on the IBM PC.  However,
each of these last three requires either a character generator chip or
some sort of graphics adapter card.  You, on the other hand, (with your
Mac, Amiga, or Atari) have a bit mapped screen, and can put up a glyph
of any shape at all, without the necessity of investing in a character
generator chip.  Thus the product is all software.  No extra hardware
needed at all.

This has an added bonus for users of APL on mainframes.  For years
there has been a scarcity of APL terminals.  That now ceases to be a
problem, because APL.68000 for the Mac and the Amiga comes with a
terminal emulator build in.

Well, there is my 2 cents worth.  I have no connection with the
company offers this APL, I just use it and I like it.  


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