On 10-Jun-06, at 2:34 PM, Roy A. Crabtree wrote:
Spreadsheets were for accounting, specific.
As such, APL was never in the running.
Not so. Up to 1987, the large insurance company I worked for did
much of their accounting and financial planning in APL. Up until
then, the Comptroller function had been filled by Actuaries. Then
CA's (chartered accountants) took over (a glut in the CA firms I
guess and CA's sought jobs in corporations). I was asked to convert
all the accounting systems out of APL which the CA's deemed to be
obsolete. I looked at other options. Eventual I contacted the
accounting department at IBM--IBM ran the entire company in APL (many
different versions). Through IPSharp I learned of many other
companies running their company with APL accounting systems. After
Reuters bought IPSharp and after Black Tuesday (and Morgan Stanley &
their early APL stock trading system), the CA's swooped into Reuters
and told them APL was obsolete.
Eventually companies bought accounting systems like SAP etc.
Database accounting systems were introduced and no-one realized that
databases did not keep a proper accounting audit trail. Not being
able to produce final results--spreadsheets were ubiquitous with lots
of labor intensive, impossible to verify but very nicely formated
financial statements. Hyperion came along trying to fill the gap
with clumsy ways to handle arrays. I can only imagine the scenarios
at Enron.
One of my friends just left Reuters as they think this year they may
be able to retire some APL systems they relied on--it merely took 20
years to develop the replacements.
Donna
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
