IBM announced that customers around the world are still obtaining tangible business results with APL, <A HREF="http://www-306.ibm.com/software/awdtools/apl/success.html">an array programming language invented 40 years ago.</A> IBM is commemorating the anniversary at events in California, Germany and other locations. APL is one of the most concise, consistent, and powerful programming languages ever devised, and other popular programming languages have spawned from its development. Originally created in 1966 by the late Dr. Kenneth E. Iverson of IBM Research, APL began as a notation to describe mathematical ideas, consisting of a set of symbols and a syntax to describe the processing of data. APL is used by both application developers and interactive end-users for problem-solving, visualization and database access. APL and its derivative version, APL2, is widely used in a diverse set of application areas, such as commercial data processing, system design and prototyping, engineering and scientific computation, and the teaching of mathematics and other subjects. APL is extremely effective in such diverse areas as "what-if" modeling, exploratory programming, interactive computing, decision support and data analysis.