APL and robotics

Abstract

Program execution speeds on today's general purpose APL running computers do not allow APL to be used as a Robot control language, this execution speed problem will go away with faster and better processors. This paper presents an attempt to make APL work for Robotics with today's technology. The basic concept is quite simple: Leave to APL what it can do in real time and have another computer running a faster language do the rest. This allows for APL program development until the other computer with the faster language can be replaced with a very fast APL running system. The auxiliary computer is an eighth processor parallel computer running FORTH. Except for the IBM-PC used to run STSC corporation's APL * PLUS/PC SYSTEM all of the hardware for this project has been designed and built by the author from the ground up.