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APLX is a very complete implementation of the APL programming language from MicroAPL. The company stopped producing it in 2016 and it has been taken over by Dyalog. While Dyalog charges for the new versions, the final version from MicroAPL is available for free at this page. It comes complete with several pdf manuals. For anyone who is interested in something completely different, I strongly suggest you get this while it is still available for free. It is available in 32 bit and 64 bit for linux, Mac and Windows.

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Good idea from to grab the final MicroAPL APLX release and manuals while they remain reachable. Archive the installer(s), PDFs and any serial/licence text together; record OS and bitness, then save a checksum (for example sha256sum installer > installer.sha256) so the files can be verified later. Note that macOS dropped support for 32‑bit apps starting with Catalina (10.15), so the macOS APLX build will not run on modern macOS without a VM or older image. (Apple Support).

For longer‑term use consider maintained/free alternatives rather than relying on legacy binaries. GNU APL is a maintained, open‑source implementation suitable for scripting and headless use (GNU APL). NARS2000 is another community APL with small installers and a bundled APL font for correct glyph display on Windows. (NARS2000 downloads).

On input: a special physical keyboard is not required (as asked). Use software input methods — Keyman or the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator for custom Windows layouts, or a Keyman layout for cross‑platform use (Keyman Developer docs). Linux users can enable APL overlays via XKB (there are APL symbol mappings in xkeyboard‑config). ().

If migration is planned, Dyalog maintains open tools for importing APLX workspaces and emulating APLX features (see the APLX migration repo). (Dyalog APLX tools on GitHub).

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Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

It seems that Dyalog, the company that took over MicroAPL, is making their implementation freely available for personal use. The Dyalog APL supports multi-threading which is a perfect fit for APL. Perhaps they will make the move to supporting GPU programming as well.

Member Avatar for ddanbe

Is the special(from outer space?) keyboard provided?

Member Avatar for Reverend Jim

You don't need a special keyboard. It just takes a little while to recall which keys are for which symbols. Lower/upper case letters are as you would expect. More common operators are alt+key. Shape (Greek rho) it alt+r. Iota is alt-i and if it is anything like MicroAPL, there is a pop-up symlist attached to a menu key that displays a clickable table of all special symbols.

The Dyalog version is more comprehensive and also supports multithreading/parallelism/concurrency. I requested a personal licence and received one within the hour. They hit me with a surprise, though. I had to download the software within 14 days. Unfortunately

  1. I am at the cottage with a small data-cap (3 gig a month)
  2. The download was 250(ish) meg

Fortunately I was able to use TeamViewer to remote into a computer at home and do the download to my home computer. Gotta love TeamViewer.

I'm looking forward to trying out Dyalog when I get home in September. Number one just started a research position in Cambridge and is very interestd in parallel processing (he has to crunch large sets of data). Currently Dyalog does not support GPU programming but it seems like it would be a great fit.

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