Most terminals used do not support APL characters. Although many microcomputers support soft fonts and some interpreters are equipped with a keyword option, and end-user APL applications should do without APL characters when in normal use, there still is a need for managing APL programming from terminals without APL characters. The authors propose a simple toolbox for the management of such situations in VM/SP environment.

Some general guidelines are discussed on why and how to develop utility functions in assembler for the APL2/PC environment. Assembler utility functions may replace some most heavily used idiomatic APL auxiliary functions and boost the effkiency of APL applications. About twenty such functions are presented, some of them perhaps useful astemporary extensions of the APL2/PC interpreter. The collection of assembler utility functions is available in the public domain, and should be extended by the joint efforts of the international APL community.APL2JPC offers several auxiliary processors for different purposes aswell as tools for writing one's own auxiliary processors. One of the auxiliary processors supplied is AP2, the Non-APL Program Auxiliary Processor. It is designed to load and execute non-APL programs, either through the DOS command interface, or directly, as APL functions. The latter is an almost ideal (not quite, due to the 64 k restriction!) interface for running assembler subroutines that meet the above-mentioned criteria.Assembler Utility Functions 358 APL 91

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The paper describes the development process and system structure of a presentation graphics software written in APL, and shows its user characteristics through a few examples.