Two topics are mixed in this paper: APL based on an ASCII dictionary, and a C implementation of this form of APL. The authors tackle two goals. First, they wish to provide a modern, free, portable APL that takes the one-letter form of most APL commands into account and uses an ASCII keyboard. Second, they explore a special C programming style using many of the preprocessing facilities.

The authors give a comprehensive explanation of the spelling scheme. They translate the most typical features of old APL into their new APL. More than 50 examples are given. The justification of the transformation of old APL to new APL is certainly valid for people involved in converting an APL interpreter from the old form of the language to the new form, but it will be useless to newcomers to the language and misleading to speakers of old APL.

The authors should remember that applying a letter-by-letter conversion does not produce a translation. For example, English or French is not translated into Russian just by replacing each character in the Latin alphabet with its Cyrillic equivalent. Also, using the same acronym for different objects is misleading. I suggest that the authors use a new name for their new programming language. Some possibilities might be VNPL or NEWPL, for a (very) new programming language; A2PL, for a second programming language; 1991PL, for programming language born in 1991; or ONELET, because most of the commands in the language are single letters.

This paper is good even though it is not a stand-alone document. It is intended for APL enthusiasts, which is appropriate, since it is published in an APL magazine. To reach a wider audience, the authors should present the results of their research in such a way that any mathematically minded person will enjoy discovering a new way of expressing mathematical problems. They should also present the implementation in a way that will attract C language people to APL.

It is clear that revamping APL to be usable on an ASCII keyboard will enable it to spread worldwide, especially if a C implementation is available. Good luck to the new APL.