And now, as they say, for something completely different. Our robot is running Dyalog APL version 13.2 for the Raspberry Pi, which was released on our major platforms (Windows, Linux, AIX) in January 2013. The next release of Dyalog APL will be version 14.0, which currently has a tentative delivery date of “sometime in the 1st half of 2014”.
We are in the final stages of the design of a number of new language features, and would like to invite interested parties to install and test the “v14.0 Tech Preview” – or download and review the Release Notes. Some of the features may be controversial, so we welcome your feedback – whether you are a user of Dyalog APL or not. The key features that we hope to validate through the release of the preview include:
- New primitive operator rank (identical to the SHARP APL implementation and the ISO/IEC 13751 Extended APL Standard)
- New primitive operator key (similar to the J definition)
- New primitive function tally (identical to the J definition)
- Function trains (similar to trains of length 3 in J)
- An extension to dyadic index of (iota), to work on higher-rank arrays (for example, to search for rows of a matrix)
- An extension to mix with axis, providing greater compatibility with IBM APL2
- New user commands to control boxed / truncated session output
- Experimental changes to the binding of function definitions
A number of these new features were discussed by John Scholes and Roger Hui at the Dyalog’12 conference – the video can be viewed on the Dyalog Conference YouTube feed, and is also embedded below (but beware, some of the design details have changed since this recording was made):
“Tech Preview II”
The current invitation is in fact for the second release of the preview; the first release was distributed to a small number of well-known (and loved) troublemakers, and has already resulted in one important change to the definition of the proposed Key operator. I would like to thank Phil Last and Paul Mansour for feedback which has resulted in the operand function being passed the relevant key value as a left argument on each invocation.
Note to users of the first preview version: The default “loco” (1060 I-Beam) setting is 2 (trains, “late” binding) in this release, as this is the setting that we are most keen to have applications tested with. It was 0 (no trains, traditional binding) in the first preview.
How You Can Help
If you are able to commit to setting some time aside to test the new language features and providing us with feedback, please write to sales at dyalog dot com and let us know why YOU should be included in the evaluation team. It would be particularly valuable to us if you have time to run an existing application on v14.0; one of the proposed language extensions is a change to name binding, which will impact the behaviour of certain language constructs. Although most of these would be labelled “exotic”, there is a chance that they are used in existing applications, and we are very interested in learning about the degree to which these changes actually cause problems for existing applications. If serious “adverse reactions” are experienced, we may be forced to abandon some of the new features.
If you do not have time to install and test the preview, you are welcome to read the Release Notes and write to us with feedback, either in response to this blog post or by writing to language at dyalog dot com.
Thanks in advance to everyone who is able to participate!
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