Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!f.gp.cs.cmu.edu!mjw
From: mjw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Witbrock)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: APL
Message-ID: <4140@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 28 Jan 89 18:17:39 GMT
Reply-To: mjw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Michael Witbrock)
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 27
Keywords:

The APL in question is, of course, MicroAPL 68000. 
It is, in general, a good APL, but (a little contrary to the reports of 
others), there are some severe deficiencies in its interface with intuition 
which make it a little difficult to use. 

To give an example: it allows you to put a resize gadget on a window, 
and merrily to resize it to your heart's content; HOWEVER, there is no way 
to find out the new size of your window. NONE. That makes resizing pretty damn 
useless, in my opinion. There is a method of hacking c routines into APL to
fix these types of problems, but the documentation is completely opaque (or at 
least it was to me). Spencer don't know beans about the package, so a call to 
the UK is probably needed to sort this out. If anyone learns how to add to 
APL 68000 this way, I'd love to hear.

There are also some screwed up things to do with the user interface (e.g. having to retype the name of a fn to a requester every time you edit it.)

Apart from that, it's a very nice package, which I'd recommend, it's fast, and 
appears to be reasonably free of bugs. It multitasks properly etc etc.
A couple of upgrades and it'd be an excellent package.

michael

-- 
Michael.Witbrock@cs.cmu.edu mjw@cs.cmu.edu                          \
US Mail: Michael Witbrock/ Dept of Computer Science                  \
         Carnegie Mellon University/ Pittsburgh PA 15213/ USA        /\
Telephone : (412) 268 3621 [Office]  (412) 441 1724 [Home]          /  \
--