Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!csd.unb.ca!Gateway.UNB.ca
From:     GA4161@SIUCVMB.BITNET
Sender:   APL Language Discussion <APL-L@UNBVM1.BITNET>
Reply-To: GA4161@SIUCVMB.BITNET
Subject:  Seeking examples of APL magic
Message-ID: <9303160330.AB15617@unb.ca>
Organization: UofNB News Gateway, Fredericton, CANADA
Date:     Mon, 15 Mar 1993 23:26:57 -0400

I am seeking real-world examples of tasks to be performed
on data contained in a RDMS that are time-consuming to
code in C, Pascal, etc. but which are entirely trivial
in APL.
For example, I encountered a situation in which the records
in a table consisted of (essentially) Boolean vectors which
denoted the presence, or abscence of given characteristics.
External to the table there was a weighting vector, w say,
with rho(w) = # of columns. The task was to rank the rows
of the table according to the sum of the characteristics
wrt the weights.

A competent C programmer (not me!) took 3 days to code a
solution. I won't offend anyone's intelligence by describing
the APL solution (given the data and the vector w in a ws).

My goal is to write an article intended for a mainstream database
magazine which essentially would say that under Windows 3 one can
use DLL's and DDE to transfer tables from your favorite RDBMS
directly to anyone of several flavors of 386-specific APL
(ranging in cost from $30 to $Manugistics) and use the examples
to illustrate why its a good idea to have the capability.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. You may e-mail to
GA4161@siucvmb.siu.edu

Thanks!
Mike Justesen
