[SCC_Active_Members] APL

[Bob Fraley]

Hi,

I heard that there is some investigation into APL.  HP's APL was mentioned 
in the discussion.  I've just made contact with Ken Van Bree, one of the 
programmers, and Alan Marcum, who was an intern from MIT who did some work 
on the project.  I don't know how to contact most of the people who were on 
the project, but here are some of the names:

Paul Stoft:  Headed HP Labs, and sponsored this project.

John Walters:  Project manager (formerly of IBM?)

Developers:
Ron Johnson
Grant Munsey
Eric Van Dyke
Ken Van Bree

Rob Kelly:  Stanford student who was on the project
Alan Marcum:  MIT student intern on the project

All of the above people were in the research labs.

Jean Danver and Bob Crum:  helped take the project into production.

For those who have not heard much about this project, this implementation 
of the APL system was essentially a JIT system.  It compiled the APL code 
to speed up execution.  Normally, APL is interpreted because there is no 
data typing.  Each entry to a procedure may have parameters having 
different types, and these types include multidimensional arrays.  Each 
time the procedure is called, one of the existing compiled versions  will 
be used if the types match.  Otherwise, a new version of the procedure will 
be compiled with the new parameter signature.  (Smaller code elements could 
also be compiled.)

The notable piece of hardware was a version of the HP terminal that had an 
APL keyboard and display.  There might have been some changes to the 
processor to speed up certain operations; I'd have to inquire further to 
find that out for sure.

This is all explained in an HP Journal article.  I don't know if the HP 
Library has archived these journals.

If anyone would like contact information, I believe that we can get in 
touch with 3 or 4 of these people.

Bob