APL Workspace Transfer

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WSINOUT

A freeware set of workspaces for transferring APL functions and variables between different APL systems. Although the workspaces are somewhat out of date, the code and documentation are kept here as they may still be useful.

The WSINOUT workspaces provide a facility for transferring functions and variables between APL systems. The system is easy to use and reliable. Copy one function into your workspace, choose the desired arguments, and execute. Error conditions are caught and reported, or a fix-up is performed and reported.

The technique is based on translating APL characters on a one-for-one basis to and from a standard character between 0 and 255 (actually the character defined by the ISIAPL character set). Functional differences between APL systems are ignored, as well as non-ISO standard APL characters; if a function is written in the ISO APL subset ("standard" APL) in one system (APL2, APL-PLUS, Dyalog APL, etc), it will execute correctly after being moved to the target system.

Jim Weigang's APL-ASCII Workspace

For another approach to workspace transfer, refer to Jim Weigang's APLASCII workspace, which has the same purpose, but uses the technique of translating APL characters into standard keywords or symbol groups from the ASCII character set. His method is well-known in the APL world.

See Jim Weigang's web site

The commands )OUT and )IN

Some APL interpreters have the special commands )OUT and )IN for workspace transfer.

See Dyalog APL Workspace Transfer Guide

Other Resources

A good article on the issues around workspace transfer is found in the APL page of the Fileformats.archivetem.org website
[Updated December 2022]