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Hello APL users,

I did not follow all the posts on this thread regarding APL, but I simply would
let you know that I am working at a big insurance company in Germany where APL
is very heavy used until today to do insurance math calculations. In 1996 I
created an interface based on the standard APL processor 11 interface to do easy
communications with programs written in other languages like C, PL/1 and
ASSEMBLER, so that APL programs can call the normal insurance math package which
is in use at this company, and this is working until today. We also created
interfaces to DB2 and MQS and XML parsers etc., and so APL is part of our
development tools for some kind of spezialized and individual applications,
which are sort of outside the normal mainstream application line (spezial
customers, special negociations etc.). Very flexible ...

APL is not only used at the z/OS environment, but also on workstations,
communicating with z machines.

We also had some problems in 2004 and 2008, because there was a serious bug in
the APL processor 11, which was very hard to find; unfortunately, the bug only
showed up on very fast machines and IBM support was not able to reproduce it, so
we had a hard time to convince them that the bug was indeed in processor 11 and
not somewhere in our code, but in the end, we succeeded, and we convinced IBM to
do the corrective patch that we proposed to their software.

I have no knowlegde of APL, myself; I'm only doing the systems programming work
to implement the interfaces etc., most of the time using ASSEMBLER. My
professional work is on z/OS most of the time, but I'm doing some hobbyist work
with Hercules and VM/370 R6 - I have built a new version of the Stanford PASCAL
compiler with some improvements - but unfortunately, I have not much time to do
this.

Kind regards

Bernd



Am 12.10.2012 09:49, schrieb J.W.:
> --- In hercules-390@yahoogroups.com, R.M. wrote:
>> An APL a day keeps the Dr. away -
>>
>> That brings up fond memories -
>>
>> While you gentlemen are working on the tech challenge of getting it to work,
>> I was just remembering that back in the 80's we had it on an early Dos box.
>> I think someone once said,
>>
>> "It takes a very senior and EXPERIENCED APL programmer about a week to
>> understand a ONE LINE program written by an EXPERIENCED APL programmer."
>>
> [plain text purists please forgive me for sending a formatted mail...
> but this is APL]
>
> Hi Roc,
>
> right you are! And this even holds true if both EXPERIENCED APL
> programmers you mention are the same person, with just a few days passed
> between writing the line and trying to read it  [;)]
>
>