TSIOPAK—a proposal for a new Sharp APL file system

ABSTRACT

Communication between OS files is often necessary when information that is manipulated and stored in Sharp APL files is required to be used by non-APL routines. For example, one may use APL for number crunching and have the output processed by SAS or FORTRAN to plot the data. The arising demand for procedures that would make data accessible from APL to other systems motivated the author to take action. TSIOPAK was developed with the intention to provide a standard interface between Sharp APL and the MVS operating system facilitating the accessibility of data created through APL and other languages. In addition, the reader will find that starting from the section titled the TSIOPAK File System, the format for each section looks very much like the Sharp APL Reference Manual. This is not a coincidence, what the author has tried to achieve with this work is to have a file system functionally identical to Sharp's using OS files. The author's efforts have gone as far as trying to replicate the format of Sharp's manual. In addition, parts of the Sharp APL File System have not been implemented in TSIOPAK due to the lack of time and resources. Hence, this paper is a proposal for a new file system which would make APL-generated data generally available.

REFERENCES

• 1: Paul Berry, I. P. Sharp Associates, Sharp APL Reference Manual, June 1981.
• 2: I. P. Sharp Associates, Sharp TSIO Users Guide, 1984.

INDEX TERMS

Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications

          Nouns: APL
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS

General Terms:
Design, Languages