Introducing Version 13

Although "general availability" of version 13.0 is planned for early 2011, we do have a pretty good idea of the features that will be in the new release – and have in fact completed most of the implementation. The main features of V13.0 are expected to be:

• Support for 128-bit Decimal Floating Point Numbers, aimed at supporting multi-currency banking applications which often require more precision than 64-bit Binary Floats can provide
• Support for Complex Numbers, for educational use and engineering applications
• In the 64-bit version, we will remove the existing limitation of 2 billion elements per array
• A Regular Expression operator, which is built upon the PCRE library, but allows the use of APL to specify how to perform replace operations
• An "Encryption Library", providing tools for Hashing, Symmetrical and Asymmetrical encryption
• In Conga v2.1, support for encrypted certificates and the Windows Certificate Store

We expect to start general beta testing before the conference; we will be demonstrating and discussing the new features at the conference, and plan to make a "conference edition" available to all conference participants. In addition to Version 13.0, we expect to be discussing the design – and demonstrating prototypes – of:

• "APL#", a completely new APL system which targets object-oriented "application virtual machines" like the Microsoft.NET framework – for applications which need to run "within" (rather than inter-operating with) these frameworks.
• "RIDE", the Remote Integrated Development Environment, a common development tool and debugger which can run in a web browser (on just about any platform), connecting to Dyalog APL and APL#, wherever these are available