Technical support program for APL related question
Authors: Erickson Don 
Published: January 2007

A technical support program was created to assist Data Processing Support Personnel at the Travelers Insurance Co. in answering employees' commonly asked questions about APL.

The Travelers Data Processing (DP) Department, in previous years, maintained a single centralized “help” number in Computer Science that employees could use to ask questions related to computers or computing. In order to foster a closer working relationship between employees in the different business areas and their local DP Support staff, the central number was eliminated and people were directed to their local DP Support.

Questions about the more commonly used languages in Data Processing, such as COBOL, are more easily redirected to the local DP Support staff than are questions about the more uncommon languages such as APL. Many of the APL questions asked of the help line were in reference to the particulars of using APL in the Travelers environment. The solutions to these types of questions are not easily found in the reference manuals, are not centrally documented, and are frequently passed by word of mouth.

Some of the more common APL questions that came to the help line include:

How do you get APL characters with 3270 emulation?

What's the best way to get a print of a workspace?

How do I use the full screen editors?

How do I run APL in batch?

How do I move a variable from host APL to LOTUS?

Is there any way to make my function run faster?

APL is such a versatile language that there are usually several ways to perform these and most other tasks. The quality of the solution given for the question at hand can range from slow and cumbersome to quick and easy. Most of the DP Support staff have limited exposure to APL, so when they search for a solution to a problem they might take a painful route and end up cursing APL when it doesn't work efficiently.

To help the DP Support areas quickly and effectively answer these types of questions, and to have a common source of the most up to date information on The Traveler's APL environment and utilities, a diagnostic tool was written using the Socrates
*
Knowledge-Base Management System software.

The software is an indexed decision tree that guides users by menu picks to an easy-to-read solution to their problem. It is compatible with commonly used terminal emulation programs, so that the user can toggle back and forth from a host session to try out suggested solutions. It is also compatible with the commonly used software generated APL characters (e.g. STSC's ECDCHAR.COM), so that APL characters can be used in the solution files.

An index file is created for the entire set of text in the support software so that the user can quickly jump to one of the references of a requested text string. The index was built without reference to common words (like some, the, and, of etc.) to make the it as efficient as possible.

Calls to the help line were tracked for several months to insure that the answers to commonly asked questions were covered. The application was structured so that the more basic the question, the more basic the solution. For example, the solution file to what a
VALUE ERROR
means assumed a lower level of APL skill than the description of what a return code of 445 from Auxiliary Processor 210 means.