TryAPL.org. TryAPL is a place where those finding APL can have a play with the core language and take automated lessons. While TryAPL has been updated continually since its debut in early 2012, we are happy to present you with these latest outwards-facing changes.
Interface
While we’ve given a slight facelift to TryAPL throughout, there is one major visual feature we’ve added: The left pane can now be resized by dragging the separator (║), and if the screen is too narrow to sensibly show the pane then it will be hidden automatically.
The Primer tooltips will now fit in all but the tiniest of windows. You can also click and drag them to a more suitable location. The permalink when hovering over a statement has been moved to the left (so it doesn’t disappear beyond the right screen edge) and given an appropriate icon (🔗︎︎︎︎).
Interpreter
TryAPL has been ported to a new interpreter (version 16 for now) and therefore sports all the newest primitives:
Furthermore, we found a way to safely limit functionality of the primitives that were previously prohibited in order to protect the server:
-
⍕Format — which cannot be inverted to execute -
⍣Power — which will no longer hang on infinite loops -
⌶I-beam — for case conversion only (🔗︎︎)
Jupyter Notebooks
An important new feature is that the lessons are now stored as Jupyter notebooks, which makes it easy to add additional lessons, both made by ourselves and contributed by the community. Our summer intern, Will Robertson, has already set a high standard when he created a handful of lessons, mainly based on the weekly APL Cultivation lessons that ran in The APL Orchard (a Stack Exchange chat room), between October ’17 and May ’18.
Most of the available lessons can be downloaded as Jupyter notebooks (click while the lesson is running) and used offline without TryAPL’s restrictions. If you want to know more about Jupyter notebooks, check out our latest webinar.
The Learn tab also has a field where you may enter the address of an online hosted Jupyter notebook document; TryAPL will attempt to fetch the contents and run the contents as a lesson.
The Primer has gotten a major overhaul. You can now select text on the tooltips so that you may copy it, and APL expressions can be clicked to insert them into the TryAPL session. We’ve also listed the supported non-primitive features with links to their online documentation, including a special TryAPL version of the new user command ]Help which, given a primitive symbol prints the tooltip for the symbol (🔗).
The Links tab now lists the newest resources with specific focus on the needs of newcomers to APL. Let us know if you think we left useful websites out.
As always, we welcome any type of feedback; drop an email to tryapl@dyalog.com!
