home
***
CD-ROM
|
disk
|
FTP
|
other
***
search
/
Power-Programmierung
/
CD1.mdf
/
apl
/
sharp
/
readme.too
< prev
next >
Wrap
Text File
|
1988-03-21
|
4KB
|
94 lines
Additional notes about shareware SHARP APL/PC:
0. What is this thing?
It's a collection of programs centered around an APL interpreter.
The interpreter itself is the very same SHARP APL interpreter that runs
on 370-architecture mainframes; that is, it's written in 370 Assembler,
and the object code included here is actually 370 object code. It runs
on a PC via a 370 emulator, written by Roger Moore and included in this
shareware package. The auxiliary programs are written specifically for
the PC, and do things like screen management, native file access, APL
component file support. The interpreter is quite robust, since it's
the same thing used for production work on mainframes and has a long
history of support and maintenance in that environment; it includes things
like complex-number arithmetic and some of the extensions like new operators
(e.g. rank) and functions (e.g. enclose, replicate, extended grade)
that Ken Iverson has been designing in recent years. On the other hand,
it *does* run through an emulator, so it will often not be as fast as
APLs written directly for PC's.
1. Where are APL characters on the keyboard?
This APL uses a keyboard we call the "union" keyboard; it differs
from the traditional APL keyboard layout in that all characters common
to the APL and ASCII character sets (upper and lower case alphabets,
digits, punctuation, well, all of typable ASCII) are in their normal
keyboard positions. For example, shift-0 is a right parenthesis, not
the 'and' primitive.
For the extra APL characters, look in the ALT shifts of the
PC keyboard. Most of them are on the traditional APL locations, but
ALT'ed rather than shifted; for example, rho is on ALT r.
Overstrikes, or composite characters: a few are available
as ALTs of single keys, but you can always construct them. For
example, transpose can be constructed by the sequence
ALT-o ALT-BS \
(the ALT-o gets you the circle, ALT-BS means you want to construct
a character based on the last one you typed and the next to be typed,
and \ is \).
2. Where are APL characters on the display?
The standard IPSA shareware distribution includes a loadable
character set for EGA displays, and according to our brochure there's
VGA support as well (I haven't got a VGA, so I can't speak from
personal experience here). To load the APL character set on an EGA,
execute the program "ega14".
If you contact IPSA at the address in the 'readme', someone
will be glad to sell you (for $29 US, currently) a ROM containing
the APL characters, if you can display only characters from a ROM.
(The shareware interpreter will execute even if you don't have the
correct character set, but your APL sure won't look like APL if you
run that way).
Finally, if you have a Hercules display, you can use Paul
Jackson's 'pjackson.fnt' font definition, loaded with whatever font loader
came with your Hercules or Hercules compatible. Paul Jackson's font
is his own property and copyright; everything else in this package
is copyrighted by I.P. Sharp Associates.
3. How do you run APL?
Put all the stuff from this ARC in a directory together
somewhere; in that directory, execute "apl" (it's a .bat file).
Many of the lines in apl.bat initiate auxiliary processors
for things like PC native file access, APL component files,
or telecommunications; to run the interpreter itself, you don't
need to have all the AP's up, so you may want to experiment with
commenting out some of it.
If you're not running with an EGA, you'll quite likely
want to remove the call to ega14 (though actually it didn't do
any harm to my Hercules-compatible display).
The very last line, though it doesn't look like it, is
what starts APL itself; it starts it indirectly, through the
emulator program "cp8x". When used without arguments, cp8x
assumes the APL interpreter is in the local directory in a
file called "sapl".
Details on all this are of course available from the
documentation you can purchase from I.P. Sharp.
4. Printer support: I'm told (again, I can't try this out directly,
I don't run with a printer locally attached to a PC) that there's
an error in the official 'readme' about this---the suggested
addition to config.sys should say "DEVICE" where it says "PRINTER"
---or something like that. Look in your DOS manuals...
Have fun!
/Roland Pesch
pesch@cup.portal.com