Dear list, after a 37 years (!) hiatus, I have the opportunity to come back to APL. Gnu apl appears to be the easiest way to do that, at least partially due to emacs' gnu-apl-mode package, which appears to be a great interface.
However, I wondered why the Debian package distributed by Gnu comes without support for libapl.so and lib_gnu_apl.so libraries,which would allow to use APL from other interface. An obvious use case would be the creation of a gnu APL kernel for Jupyter : I tried Dyalog's interpreter and its Jupyter notebook kernel, and appreciated the result, but Dyalog's software is not free (even when it's gratis). Another use case would be a minimal ob-apl package allowing the inclusion of APL code and results in an org document, a form of writing I use more and more... Both of these use cases could be covered by a "clever" use of expect (or pexpect, in Python's case), but interfacing with libraries would probably be much easier. Furthermore, keeping a *packaged* version of APL makes its maintenance much easier. So I'm looking for hints and advice on how to recompile and repackage APL for Debian(-like) systems with libraries support (I am aware that this possibly could result in the creation of distinct packages, at least for lib_gnu_apl.so : libapl.so could be part of the main apl package, where the binary apl could be a user front end calling it for computation). Secondary question : it appears that this part of Ubuntu, but not of Debian. Do you know why ? BTW : I'm not (yet) on the list, so I would appreciate a Cc: emm.charpent...@free.fr of your (eagerly awaited) replies. Sincerely, -- Emmanuel Charpentier
