[Bug-apl] FW: Question on installing GNU APL on Windows

[Richard Levine]

Hello All - 

Forwarding an email (see below) from Fred Weigel, which contains much good 
information for this topic.

Note - This is all starting to form a clearer picture in my mind. Thanks to all 
for helping. It seems many key points have been mentioned or hinted at. I'll 
try to sum up this evening.

RL

Richard Levine
Professor, School of Computer Technology, George Brown College
416-460-6499

-----Original Message-----
From: fred 
Sent: Monday, November 02, 2015 5:59 AM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: [Bug-apl] Question on installing GNU APL on Windows

Richard

A couple of points:

The goal of GNU is to promote free (libre) software. The FSF does not support 
Windows. For that matter, not even Unix. GNU stands for "GNU is Not Unix". Hurd 
and Linux are the primary platforms. However, autoconf does support MANY Unix 
and POSIX platforms.

In general, the sequence is "./configure" "make" "make install". GNU APL has 
two builds -- as a library that can be called from other software, and as an 
executable. I build both with a "build" script -- here is my build script:

# build both apl executable and library
#
cd $1
#
./configure CORE_COUNT_WANTED=SYL PERFORMANCE_COUNTERS_WANTED=yes --with 
-libapl make sudo make install # ./configure CORE_COUNT_WANTED=SYL 
PERFORMANCE_COUNTERS_WANTED=yes make sudo make install # cd ..

The options CORE_COUNT_WANTED and PERFORMANCE_COUNTERS_WANTED are to build GNU 
APL to use multiple cores on my hardware. Both are optional and can be omitted.

CYGWIN is a project to supply a POSIX layer for Windows. Cygwin is a target for 
the configure/make/make install method. The "xterm" idea is that xterm supports 
UTF-8, which is the character set used to display APL characters.

My recommendations? Being a supporter of libre software -- in order of 
preference

1 - Use Linux
2 - Use Linux under VirtualBox on Windows
3 - Use Cygwin
4 - Attempt a "native Windows" build

You can install VirtualBox, then Ubuntu, then GNU APL. If you find Ubuntu 
useful enough, you can install it on the "raw machine". I use Fedora, but I 
believe most new users prefer Ubuntu.

Fred Weigel