Eugene McDonnell

Eugene Edward McDonnell (b. 18 October, 1926 in Brooklyn, New York, USA) is a pioneer and long-time contributor to APL and J. After serving as an infantry corporal in U.S. Army in World War II, he attended the University of Kentucky, graduating in 1949 summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a First Year Graduate Fellowship to Harvard University, where he studied comparative literature, particularly Dante’s Divine Comedy.

His first work at IBM was in the design of IBM’s first Time-Sharing system, which became a very early host to IVSYS, a predecessor of APL. In 1968 he became a colleague of Ken Iverson, and was using Iverson notation before APL was named, and was active in the very earliest days of APL. He holds U.S. Patent 3,400,376 (3 September, 1968) "Information Transfer Control System" allowing communication between two users. In 1978 he left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates. He retired from I.P. Sharp in 1990.

At IBM McDonnell devised the notation for the signum and circle functions in APL, designed the complex floor function, and proposed the extension of or and and to GCD and LCM. With Iverson he was responsible for the inclusion of hooks and forks in J. The result of zero divided by zero in J is as he proposed in 1976. He won the Iverson Award in 1987.

McDonnell was the editor of the APL Press, producing "A Source Book in APL" and "APL Quote Quad, the Early Years". He was the editor and principal contributor of the Recreational APL column in APL Quote-Quad for many years. He has written dozens of the "At Play with J" columns in Vector, the journal of the British APL Association. He contributes to Sloane's On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

Conferences

• IBM69 Boston, A Formal Description of JCL
• APL73 Toronto, The Variety of Alternative Definitions of a Simple Function
• APL73 Copenhagen, Complex Floor
• APL74 Anaheim, The Caret Functions
• APL75 Pisa, A Notation for the GCD and LCM Functions
• APL76 Ottawa, Zero Divided By Zero
• IBM78 Foothill College, Los Altos, organizer
• APL79 Rochester, NY, Fuzzy Residue
• APL80 Noordwijkerhout, Netherlands, Extending APL to Infinity, with Jeffrey Shallit
• IPSA80 Toronto, Commercial Applications for Event Handling
• APL81 San Francisco, conference chairman
• APL84 Helsinki, APL award
• APL86 Manchester, UK, A Perfect Square Root Routine
• APL87 Dallas, Iverson Award
• APL88 Sydney, Life: Nasty, Brutish, and Short
• APL89 NYC, Phrasal Forms, with Kenneth E. Iverson (introduces hooks and forks)
• APL90 Copenhagen, APL\?, with Roger Hui, Kenneth E. Iverson, and Arthur Whitney (introduces J)
• APL91 Stanford, conference organizer
• APL93 Toronto, From Trees Into Boxes, with David Steinbrook

Anecdotes

• McDonnell's recounting of the development of the circle function is entited "The Story of ○".
• As of 17 December, 1998, McDonnell has received 12 Knuth reward checks totalling $70.07.
• McDonnell lives a short walk from k inventor Arthur Whitney and wrote one of the early k manuals.

External links

• "At Play With J" columns
• Remembering Ken Iverson