I don't have an answer to the initial question about SAX availability. While I managed the creation of SAX for IPSA, I haven't had access to the product since I closed the Palo Alto office in 1992.
I can answer the question about the nature of the SAX product. SAX began as a joint development effort between STSC and IPSA. We began with STSC's UNIX-based product written primarily in C. It included all of the system functions which had been jointly
developed with IPSA for our existing IBM products, including the component file system and quad-FMT. It had STSC'S error and event handling, and their NARS language extensions. The implementation included code and go of machine instructions to provide
faster loops for several primitives, much like the common code of our similar mainframe products.
The initial SAX release replaced NARS language extensions with Ken Iverson's ideas, many of which were already available in Sharp APL. It added IPSA's quad-TRAP, and since that allows errors be resumed mid statement, it required a bit of redesign of the
STSC approach to storing functions which had been designed to reduce syntax analysis. We also added shared variables, packages and the character left argument for thorn.
In addition to a lot of work on performance improvement, the second release focused on adding network shared variables. I believe that was also when we disconnected the interpreter from the session manager. This allowed the product to be used as a Unix
application with input and output directed to files or pipes.
Just about every new machine vendor we encountered had some issues with their Unix which had to be overcome. While several machines had the same instruction set, their assembler language presented different sequences for arguments, especially for
floating-point instructions. At the time we were developing SAX, Unix only supported pipes for inter-process communication which was designed around a few characters at a time instead of the large strings which shared variables required. This ment code
changes for the shared variable processor, and a special install sequence for something that was part of the Unix kernel.
On Sunday, December 6, 2020 at 4:32:26 PM UTC-8, jib...@gmail.com wrote:
I remember reviewing SAX long before Solitron was dissolved. It's my recollection that IP Sharp's APL was a "descendent" of APL\360. The documentation of SHARP APL states: "It's a collection of programs centered around an APL interpreter. The
interpreter itself is the very same SHARP APL interpreter that runs on 370-architecture mainframes; that is, it's written in 370 Assembler, and the object code included here is actually 370 object code. It runs on a PC via a 370 emulator, written by
Roger Moore and included in this shareware package."
Was Solitron's SAX a complete, native reimplementation of IP Sharp's APL or does it carries this 370 emulator?
/Jerome
On Tuesday, 26 November 2019 12:01:44 UTC-8, pahihu wrote:
Hi,
I would like to play with SAX for Linux, but I know that Soliton no longer distributes >> the Linux version for personal use.
Does anyone can point me to a site, where I can download the distribution ?
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