Editorial

by Duncan Pearson

As promised in the last issue of Vector we have from the irrepressible Adrian Smith a report of the APL2000 user conference in Orlando together with news of the recent meeting of the Danish APL group kindly reported by Gitte Christensen and Stefano Lanzavecchia. Furthermore, by the time you read this we will have had the first BAA Internet meeting, a meeting not just about but also on the Internet. Again a full report will be included in the next issue, and if it is successful no doubt more will follow along the same lines.

On the technical front we have from Eric Lescasse a good introduction to the use of VBX and OCX controls from APL+Win. The particular example is a grid control and perhaps will go some way to easing the frustration felt by many APL+Win users who acutely feel the lack of a grid control built into the interpreter. Also I am pleased that at last someone has answered the plea for discussion among APL developers of the ways in which namespaces might be implemented, enhanced or used. We have an article from Douglas Bohrer which explores some of the possibilities offered by DyalogAPL and offers some ways in which he believes that it might be improved. I hope that this promotes some discussion. I know that there are some who having moved to using namespaces feel that they could not move back. Others, after initial interest, find that they do not offer what they had hoped and so go back to tried and tested methods of workspace organisation such as function files. We would like to hear from you.

In J we have the third of Chris Burke’s excellent articles on J for the APL programmer. I have found them most instructive. It is good at last to see the differences highlighted and perhaps surprising to see where the similarities lie. This was clear to attendees of Chris’s tutorial at Lancaster, some of whom were surprised at the length of time that Chris spent in APL. It is also the subject of an article by Norman Thomson on the way the use of operators in J has influenced the way he writes APL.

We also have a remarkable coincidence, with an article from David Alis on a way of tracing the execution of long strings of J arriving a few days before a submission from Roger Hui describing a new foreign conjunction that will provide exactly those facilities. We have still included the article from David Alis as the approach is of interest and because it demonstrates some subtle points about the rank of functions. Roger assures me that the new version will be available from mid-January.