I am curious how APL operates in the new environment. As I have not
bothered
to install any APL on the machines I have setup with Windows 95 (only J)
then
I have no experience how APL is doing there.

Does anyone have any success or failure story about it ?

J2 works fine with only very minor font problems in very very specific
situations.
For most parts everything works. As this is only a Windows 3.x product
I can not complain about it at all. ISI has made a commitment to come out
soon with a real W95 version so I am not worried of recommending use of
J there and have set up the freeware on a few in the hope people will
pick
up the habit of using it and get appetite for more.

What is a bit worrying is that despite our best intentions to go slowly
with
implementing W95 it is pouring in everywhere. People are of course
demanding
support for it even if we made a broad statement to everyone to not go
ahead
until the support organization had time to come around to help them in
turn.

We recommended the software companies that work for us to go slow and
they are now wondering what our policy really is because they see W95
popping up all over the place.

I have personally installed W95 on various types of machines that people
had
problems with because of lack of memory or diskspace. I have learned a
lot
about W95 by it and it is unbelievable what people are willing to put up
with.
Performance does not seem to be an issue at all.

Can you imagine the time it takes to install W95, W95+ and W95 office on
a
4Mb machine ? Let alone t{*filter*} the system options and let the machine
run the compression and other disk operations. Still the user is happy as
a
cucumber. He wanted W95 at all costs. How long the happiness last is
not clear but it is amazing that it works in the first place. Many times
I thought
the machine was dead but it always survived and I have had more fun
watching
grass grow.

I have to say that the Pinball game is a treat. I had no idea you needed
14 pages of instructions to use it !!! I think I played pinball once or
twice
before W95 but several times since then. I could very well imagine that
Pinball is a major attraction to get people into W95.

It is like the flight simulator earlier. I remember installing a few PCs
way back when. Put visicalc and/or lotus 123 and some stuff like that
on the PCs plus as an afterthought some games. Then calling the
executives a few days later to ask about prgress. They had never
and any time to look at the calculators and something that had any
relevance to their work but the flight simulator they had been spending
hours on.

We need something like Pinball in J to get mass hysteria there too.
Some fun and games. Cardgames and chess if nothing else.
/Gosi

Can you be more specific about J2 font problems running under Windows
95?  For various reasons (good, I believe), I'm anxious to upgrade to
Win 95 as soon as possible.

--

  Mathematics & Statistics Dept.            Voice:  413-545-2859 (W)
  University of Massachusetts                       413-549-1020 (H)
  Amherst, MA 01003                           Fax:  413-545-180

   > Can you be more specific about J2 font problems running under
Windows
   > 95?  For various reasons (good, I believe), I'm anxious to upgrade
to
   > Win 95 as soon as possible.
Sorry about that I probably implied more problems than what it really is
by
making such a comment.

What does happen is that when I have had many sessions of all kinds of
applications for a long time without closing any of them. I have no idea
what
happens but some w95 windows suddenly may have changed font or some
other attribute. In the case of J2 it may happen that what you see in the

session log may not be what you get when you try to reuse it.

This is very strange and I have not been able to create this phenomenon
when
I have tried. It happens very seldom and all these months I have been
using
J2 on top of w95 it has not happend very often. If I close the session
and start
again it is gone. If I execute the lines form the script as I have
started to do
now since I learned the trick (point at a line press ctrl+r and it moves
to the
excute window and excutes) it has never occurred there.

I have experienced similar problems with other apps in w95.

I have reported these problems to the w95/J development team and the
problems are solved in the upcoming version. It turns out that windows
is behaving somewhat differently than it did in the past so old windows
apps may not work the same as in the past. This is the wonderful thing
about progress it keeps people like me in some demand.

So you do not need to worry about upgrading J2 apps to w95 they will
most likely work without any problems whatsoever. I would not be too
surprised that you will be receiving Visual J95 shortly and all your
worries
will be over.
/Gosi

I prefer NT
Near as I can see (no extensive testing)
Manugistics APLIII works in all eviornments
Dyalog works with Win 3.1 and Win 95 ( new release due any day)

Hope that answers your question

Will J support Unicode?

Why do you want/need an ascii version of APL (unfair question but it
seems like J
is an answer to problems long gone and an excellent way to kill the
few APL vendors
that still exist)

  >I prefer NT
I have to say that I do prefer many things in the NT as well.
Particularly the file system (NTFS compared to FAT).
But I do prefer many things in W95 and I use W95 for my everyday
work. I have one NT and one W95 on my desk and I of course let them
communicate.

Even if the NT is more robust than W95 then W95 has more interesting
things going for it and my bet is that more people will prefer w95 to NT.

  > Will J support Unicode?
what is Unicode ?

  > Why do you want/need an ascii version of APL (unfair question but it
  > seems like J
  > is an answer to problems long gone and an excellent way to kill the
  > few APL vendors
  > that still exist)
In the real world the problems J is solving are unfortunately (for the
rest
of the APL community) not long gone.

Many people believe that when they themselves do not have problems
then the rest of the world does not have any problems.

I can easily type the apl chars blindfolded on a keyboard that does not
support APL chars. I have even written APL functions without seeing them
on the display. It is hard but it is doable. Trying to fix those same APL
functions is definitely hard.

Besides solving these problems that some people fortunately do not see
as problems (good for them) then J is actually the best APL around. I can
not imagine anyone trying to argue otherwise (unless there were some
business favoritism involved).

I do like that the arguments are about which APL to use rather than if
you should be using APL at all. The more APLers we have the better.

I find it enormously stimulating that we have all these APL dialects
supporting windows because I think APL and windows belong together
as well as it fits very well in with client/server and object
orientation.

I do not think there is a big risk that J will kill the few vendors there
is.
Even if it is the best APL without doubt then the other APLs have their
merits and dedicated followers.

As we probably all know then the majority of APL systems have been
made for data analysis. APL was particularly well suited to handle vast
amounts of data. Most of the bigger APL systems worked on their own
relational databases long before we had SQL.

Now that we do have SQL and a number of query tools running on them
there is a challenge to APLers to create tools to take good advantage
of these databases.

In J there is a very fine interface to ODBC and the SQL data comes into
J just like it had been created for J and can obviously be manipulated
directly.

We do need some really good applications to demonstrate the power of J
over the rest of the query tools who mostly just pass on their results to
some neighboring tool. J can do it all. Do the query. Operate on the
data. Write it out. Print it out. Present it in graphics. Whatever.
/Gosi
http://www.simi.is

Dyalog APL/W 7.1 works very well under Windows 95, OS/2, Win 3.1.
 Dyadic Systems has just announced a new version of APL/W that is
specific to Windows 95 and will allow any APL applications
developed under APL/W to qualify for the Windows 95 logo.  This
version will also support OCXs and OLE 2.0 along with all the
other great features of APL/W.