A SOFTWARE HIGH PERFORMANCE APL INTERPRETER

The design of a high performance APL system is presented along with an evaluation of the performance improvement measured on a partial implementation. The system contains a compiler which translates APL into the instructions of a virtual APL machine. Numerous special techniques suitable for optimized interpretation of this virtuaI machine entirely in software on a System 370 are described. The overhead for executing APL programs has been reduced by a factor ranging between 5 and 10 when compared to cciverrti oneI interpretive systems. One realistic example is analyzed in depth; there the compiled version runs 6 to 8 times faster than APLSV (Version 1.2) .

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