APL has had a dedicated following for many years among some sections of the academic and industrial statistical communities. One of its greatest strengths is its value as a specification language. Not only can algorithms be described consistently and unambiguously, but also, given an appropriate interpreter, the specifications can be immediately executed. A group of academic and industrial statisticians in the United Kingdom recognized these capabilities and embarked on a project called ASL (APL Statistics Library) with the support of the British APL Association. ASL aims to provide a collection of coherent APL functions for widely used statistical calculations, thereby creating stan-dards for the unambiguous expression of statistical algorithms. A natural consequence of this is that discussions of more complex algorithms and methods can occur without the need to revisit and redefine basic functions and the ways in which they interpret data.
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