Sender: Postmaster@iecc.cambridge.ma.us
Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!howland.reston.ans.net!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!decwrl!world!iecc!mailgateway
X-To: ljdickey@math.uwaterloo.ca comp-lang-apl
Subject: Re: APL\11 source now available
References: <C5JqGs.8Cu@math.uwaterloo.ca>
Organization: I.E.C.C.
X-Cc: 
Date: 28 Apr 93 18:56:45 EDT (Wed)
From: johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Message-ID: <9304281856.AA10384@iecc.cambridge.ma.us>
Lines: 31

In article <C5JqGs.8Cu@math.uwaterloo.ca> you write:
>The source code for the APL\11 interpreter is now available for
>distribution.  ...
>It started life as the brain child of Ken Thompson at Bell
>Laboratories, and the work was carried on by John Bruner and Anthony
>Reeves, graduate student and supervisor, who were then both at Purdue
>University.

Oh, wow.  Ken originally wrote the APL interpreter as a weekend hack.
When I was at Yale in about 1976, I dropped by the labs one day and got a
copy of it on a tape (a DECtape, as I recall) and put in some improvements
to make it useful, like workspace load and save and support for the APL
character sets on the terminals we were using.  I also added circle-quad
to do graphical output on the early bitmap GEM terminals we had.  This
took about 3 days.  I added the A P L \ 1 1 banner as a lark, so it would
look a little more like APL\360.

Some of the undergraduates threw in a few more featurettes, most notably
support for different keyboards and character sets without changing all
the code and a primitive function editor.  (In Ken's version, functions
were read from files and you could shell out to ed to edit them.)  Then I
sent it in to usenix, and it went out on the first or second usenix tape,
which is where I presume the Purdue people got it.

Since I never expected it to be around this long, I didn't go to much
effort to make it clear who had done what.  But you can tell that I
added the workspace support.  The magic number for APL\11 workspaces is
octal 100554 because my birthday (in decimal) is 10 May 54.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us, {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl
