Japanese APL language system on IBM Multistation 5550

This paper exemplifies the national language support of a programming language by describing the implementation of APL with a language facility for processing Japanese characters: that is, a character set that has “wide” characters that occupy space of more than one byte. By national language support, in this paper, we mean that users are enabled to use their own national language in the data, as legal character strings of the programming language. We describe the implementation of APL that provides Japanese language support in the above sense on a personal computer called the IBM Multistation 5550. We also discuss the design principle adopted to include a new two-byte character set in APL data objects coexisting with a conventional one-byte APL character set.