Thank you for the information on Larry Breed. Many years ago, I was a systems programmer at UCLA and worked with Larry in the installation of APL\360 at UCLA. That was probably in 1969 or 1970. Larry was a nice guy. I’m sure he will be missed.
Jim Adams On May 18, 2021, at 8:41 PM, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote: Larry Breed <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_M._Breed>, *APL*\360 implementer, died on 2021-05-16. As with this kind of stuff these days, I found out when someone edited his Wikipedia page with the death date. Subsequently, Bob Smith confirmed that Larry had died while surrounded with his siblings. Larry’s programming skills are the stuff of legend. I was told that he did the original implementation of ⍕⍵ over a weekend. In case you are not impressed, that was done in S/360 assembler. Ken Iverson told me that it was Larry who championed and implemented dynamic scoping after attending a talk by Alan Perlis. From the Jim Brown sketch in *APL Since 1978 <https://doi.org/10.1145/3386319>*: In 1969, he got a summer position with the APL group at IBM Yorktown Research. Due to an administrative error, the summer job was not terminated after the summer and lasted three years. Jim says today: Larry is pretty much responsible for my APL career. He was my first manager at Yorktown Research although I didn’t know he was a manager until the exit interview. He messed up the termination so I just kept working from Syracuse. Yes, APL (I am including J) has quite a character set, as in, what a bunch of characters. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
