David's is a thoughtful email which which we should consider without prejudice. The ISO standard makes clear, in chapter 4, what it means to be compliant.
When I worked at IPSA Ken Iverson's office was just a couple away from mine. He was very thoughtful of what should be added/extended to the language and the QUAD's. At the time we were adding shared variables, fairly new at that time and long before APL2. IPSA APL had a component file system, BSS, initially written by Larry Breed. Because it was essential, it was integrated into IPSA APL and we had a set of Quad functions to use it. I cannot recall now but I'm pretty sure they were not part of the APL/360 manual. When we were exploring new capabilities we used to model them in APL first and there were special privileges, really restricted to only some zoo members, to be able to run them. Later on they might be written in Assembly, which was the implementation language used at that time. Because I'm old now <and "old school" as well I guess> I suggest that we err on the side of caution. Because the present GNU APL is the best thing that has come along in years, it would be a pity to burden it with the sort of feature creep that has happened to far to many pieces of SW. Much ado about nothing. Perhaps the place for the experimenting with these sort of things is in a branch, not the trunk. And like fine wine let them ferment and mature in order to get the full flavour and benefit. (Which reminds me time to pour a glass of red cab/sauv) If I have misunderstood the gist of the various proposals then feel free to correct me. respect… Peter
