APLNEWS for Japanese Audience

from Kyosuke Saigusa

We started to distribute APL related news to Japanese audience strictly in Japanese language via our APL programmed Web site (http://aplcons.com/apl) in recent months. I would like to introduce some reported items to you, wondering if they are of some interest outside Japan.

An interesting demo program has been completed based on the APL COM interface, which became available with IBM APL2 Windows version released in May this year (Workstation APL2 V2.6).

This program (about 250 lines of APL2 code with only one utility subroutine) will start Excel and allow computation of the data on Excel sheets (regarded as pages of 2 dimension arrays in front of you) interactively from an APL window by simple APL statements handling 2-dimension arrays.

This will take XLS, CSV,ATF files for input and allow parallel processing between APL and Excel because any changes made on Excel side will be reflected in APL processing because the latest data are always read-in prior to APL processing..

The program will run in full licensed interpreter as well as non-licenced APL2 runtime. Any APL interpreter functions in respective environments are usable without restrictions. We intend to use this program to broaden the base of APL users amongst the Excel users.

There are other topics, such as a common utility APL function library based on namespaces which allow even GRAPHPAK as external functions with a lot of merits for APL group users and Windows dialog design scheme for application developers for higher productivity than standard approach.

But APL2-COM demo-program reminds us of the importance of the use of a very small elementary part of APL2 language for general public for practical results. It will be distributed basically free of charge to individuals outside enterprises. Any inquiries are most welcome.