Subject: APL Newsreader - a recommendation to try it
From: richard.levine@canrem.com (Richard Levine)
Date: Sun, 27 Aug 95 04:10:00 -0500
Organization: CRS Online  (Toronto, Ontario)

This is a recommendation for trying out the APL Newsreader
which Jim Weigang has written, and talked about recently in
comp.lang.apl.

I have tried it, and I recommend it highly for anyone who
follows the threads of comp.lang.apl, or
anyone who wants to read the archives of comp.lang.apl,
which are amazingly useful when read in an organized
fashion!!

How to do this?  I suggest trying Jim's APL Newsreader.

It is a stand-alone application for reviewing
the messages in comp.lang.apl, but in fact it works for any
USENET newsgroup.  It does not require any particular APL
interpreter, because it comes with an APL*PLUS II run-time
interpreter.  The application is very easy to use.  (For APL
users, it includes a feature to translating APL ASCII
keywords -- using Jim's APL ASCII translation scheme which
is quite popular -- into the APL characters.)

I have found it exceptionally useful for following the
threads currently in the newsgroup, in particular because
one can sort by Subject, Thread, Author, and so on.  It is
also quite fast (at least on my 486) and quite robust.  The
system will write selected messages (in any order) to a file
for you to print, include in other documents, edit, etc.

Archives of comp.lang.apl are available.  It is fascinating
and instructive to review the discussions (well-organized
and sorted and displayed) via the Newsreader, going back to
1991.

There is a "ton" of good material for people interested
in APL and J.

However, the Newsreader is not limited to prepared archives.
The user can add their own messages downloaded from their
system to the Newsreader files.  I have found this to be one
of the exceptional value-added features of the Newsreader.
(Depending on the circumstances, some programmed pre-
processing may be required to massage your data.  For
example, UNIX-based users may have less work than me, since
I download from a BBS which prepares files in "non-standard"
format.  However, I wrote a program (in the J language) to
massage my messages, which works quite well.

For more information, consult recent previous messages in
comp.lang.apl that are available to you, or contact Jim
Weigang directly (jimw@math.umass.edu)

I received the APL Newsreader from Jim's free diskettes
available by mailing list which is "slow but sure" and costs
no more than postage (about $1.50 Can).  I also received it
via the 95 Software Exchange disks (with partial '95
archive) advertised recently by Dick Holt.  It is also
available directly from Jim (with full archive), or (I
believe) via ftp (with partial '94 archive) from the
"famous" Waterloo archives (consult the APL FAQ).

In summary, I think Jim deserves a lot of credit for
making the excellent APL freeware package available to
any interested person.

--R. Levine
