/
Prepared for Toronto APL Conference , 1997 /
20120919 | This article is translated to Serbo-Croatian language by Web Geeks.
The Evolution of CoSy
Abstract
CoSy is the NoteComputing environment I have evolved
with for general support in the business of life since meeting APL in
the mid `70s . Current CoSy was constructed in old STSC flat PC-APL in
1984 as an open-source hypertext browser of its own objects -- altho
that vocabuary was not yet in use . The target now is to rip the organs
of Window95 ( OLEs ) open into a coherent linguistic structure down to
the hardware - creating an environment providing the user/programmer
complete control over their notebook computer . The practical next step
is to integrate CoSy with a competitive APL language community and all
the algorithms its members are interested in sharing .
|FRI.MAY,970502,16:13-4| Cf :
www.torontoapl.org/apl97/abs2.htm#p15
CoSy : Toward computer aided individual .
CoSy is the product of my life with the notebook computer .
When Pascal was all the academic rage , I learned
Algebra and APL :
CoSy/Views/PsychoPhysics
Losing my tenure in grad school , there not being much
of a market for undegreed mathematical psychophysicists , APL was my
only mktable skill . I looked in the Chicago yellow pages and amazingly
there were 3 companys listed : STSC , PCI and I.P.Sharp Associates . I
was hired by JimRoyers of IPSA but was fired 13 days later for
insubordination , specifically broadcasting a proposal to collect a
workspace of PROFILE latent functions for environment initialization
and email access rather than write yet another for the Chicago office .
My wife was not amused . Heading toward divorce , still with unlimited
access to the university computing center , I spent nights trying to
solve the drawing of n-dimensional cubes as a demo of Computer Aided
Intelligence - an example of something perhaps not solvable other than
with the Tool of Thought we call APL . See : CoSy/CoSyLogo
Eventually , I got a contract programmer job at Xerox
in Rochester NY maintaining their world wide market forecasting system
- APL by Cobol heads . It was at this time I named my business "
Coherent " Systems in contradistinction to the masses of code I
inherited . ( When the issue came up , I
chose 'CoSy' as my e-mail name for IPSA`s mail system . )
I ended up rewriting the whole numerical data base system as an
n-dimensional sparse array turning what took over night to compute into
at most a couple of minutes . One problem with gaining wide acceptance
for APL is that systems in APL are often too easy to create to think of
spending the resources marketing .
CoSy started evolving during this life as consultant -
spending most of the time programming , but needing to answer the phone
and deal with business .
The evolution of CoSy from this period thru the mid `80s is discussed
with pictures of some of the hardware in CoSy/Lang/Hardware
.
The latter part of the `80s , and only finishing up now
, my time got pretty much consumed by family matters commuting about
half each month back to Chicago . It really was only starting in `87
that I gained a practical understanding of accounting and created the
F5 execution functions to support the maintanance of ledgers . CoSy`s
unmatched record keeping and general business capabilities were
severely tested in courts during that period . The logic of IRS and
Illinois Individual and Trust tax forms were also embedded in CoSy
using the F5 functions and related extensions . These modeling
capabilities are generalizations and simplifications of the mechanisms
used for RG&E`s corporate model
( See CoSy/Lang/Hardware
)
It would have been impossible to split my life like this without CoSy
to carry it in .
The current state of my ideas on language is pretty
well described in
CoSy/Language/Ultimate presented at the 1994 Rochester
FORTH conference .
See also CoSy/Language
for further thoughts , and particularly
CoSyGatheringų960204.Invite for an illustration of the sort
of script environment I am heading toward .
|
