Watcom APL by GEMESYS Ltd.

WatAPL is an Android version of the early Watcom APL. Now runs on Android 5.

Watcom APL was developed in the early 1980's as an APL implementation for the newly released IBM P/C. It is being made available here under the "Open Watcom" initiative. The executable files were recovered from an old 5.25 inch floppy diskette which took some effort just to read. Although the workspace size is less than 500K, it represents a workable and well-engineered APL environment. It's operation under the Android operating system has been accomplished by making use of a hybrid DOSbox/DOSEMU emulator, which corrects certain mathematical issues with DOSbox. I have made this version of DOSBox available as "gDOSbox".

GEMESYS Ltd. is pleased to offer this product as part of our commitment to the open source development model. APL stands for "A Programming Language", and dates from the days of early mainframe computers. It was developed in Canada by Dr. Ken Iverson, initially as a mathematical notation. It was one of the very first fully interactive computer environments, and it is still sometimes used by banks, insurance companies, financial houses and research labs for data-driven analytic calculations and program prototype development and verification.

This version is experimental, and has only been fully tested on a very small subset of Android devices. I currently am running it on a Samsung Galaxy Tab-3, Tab-4 and Galaxy Tab-A.

Please note this software comes with no warranty of any kind, and is intended for educational use. That means it may not work as expected.

Also, although the APL character set can be displayed in graphics mode, it is not displayed on the standard Android keyboard. The default workspace, loaded when the application is run, has a "HELP" function which shows which APL characters are associated with their ASCII-text counterparts, as shown on the standard Android keyboard.

Note on Version 1.0.1 of WatAPL: Version 1.0.1 provides an updated startup workspace, MCLWS which now includes file functions, as well as a simple file translation program, called TRANCOPY. TRANCOPY is use to translate text files downloaded into the /sdcard/download directory from files where each record ends with linefeed, to DOS-style files where each record ends with carriage-return+linefeed. It also attaches an end-of-file marker, needed by the WatAPL file functions. This allows, for example, the .CSV files (comma-separated value text files) of stock prices, which can be downloaded from Yahoo Finance, to be translated into DOS format, and loaded and processed by WatAPL. You can run TRANCOPY from gDOSbox, and used it to translate the TABLE.CSV file that Yahoo Finance will create in your \DOWNLOAD directory, into a file that you can read with WatAPL. An example APL function, called "READ_LIST_TEXT" is provided in the current version of the startup workspace, MCLWS, which reads and displays any DOS-format text file.

Update - June 2015

*** WatAPL now runs on Android-5 ! The change involved re-coding jobject pointers that were local static to use the NewGlobalRef feature, first documented in Android ICS (Ice Cream Sandwich), and now part of the new ART (Android Run Time engine) in Android 5 (Lollipop) devices. WatAPL users are encourged to forward operation reports to our email address. Current testing has been limited to Android 5.0.2 tablets, including Samsung Galaxy Tab-A, Tab-3 and Tab-4.

- Mark Langdon

GEMESYS Ltd.