Congratulations on your selection of a SetSphere calculator:
ASPL = A Set Programming Language, is a set-calculator that runs on the UNIX system. This set-calculator is the first in digital computation technology that makes group based data calculation job quicker and easier.

The ASPL interpreter is a totally new type of interactive language processor for set calculations. It is the first interactive language processor to do set calculations on variables using symbolic group operators. Beside 113 symbolic operators, the calculator also makes it possible to produce differential group variables by providing verb-commands to replay operators on sets; hence, showing the rate of change in these sets.

It can be viewed as a general purpose set-calculator that has many features to do set operations, sequence alignment operations, and similarity calculations. The ASPL interpreter has the following features:

• The user can effectively interact with objects at the ASPL prompt.
• Programmable with ASPL scripting language.
• Symbolic operators are in plain ASCII characters.
• Comparison of group elements based on their entropies and checksums.
• Compare groups by displaying their sequence alignments.
• Instantly calculate the similarity between set variables.
• Get the partition of groups represented by set variables.
• Get the quotient sets by applying quotient relations on set operators.
• Capture temporal changes in a group using differential group variables.
• Play a set operation intermittently to get the temporal rate of change in a group.
• Provide contextual set intersection and difference for GEOmetric data.
• Instant access to a selection of preprogrammed global grouping functions.
• A collection of element grouping classes used along sample workspaces.
• Compare and display the data between groups in colors.

In this user guide we refer to the UNIX shell prompt with a hash as shown here

#  aspl WS1
     (enter aspl at the shell prompt to start ASPL loading namedspace WS1)

The commands issued at the aspl prompt start with aspl> as shown here

aspl> help
    (show help)

A series of commands can be numbered, for example:

①  aspl> sim a1 a2 a3
    (show the similarity between a1, a2, and a3)

②  aspl> sim`c a1 a2 a3
    (show the similarity between a1, a2, and a3 considering the checksum attribute)

③  aspl> sima123 = sim a1 a2 a3
    (assign to the COS variable sima123 the similarity result)

④  aspl> ?c sima123
    (interrogate the similarity held in the COS variable sima123)

⑤  aspl> cos
    (print the COS symbol table)

The examples in each chapter have been numbered. An example is usually followed by the operations that are carried in the example. You may notice a tee command being injected in some operations, or being passed to the ASPL interpreter. Such tee commands were placed solely for the production of the manuscript and should be ignored. Also, we use the word dataset to refer to the group represented by a set variable. In the context of ASPL, a dataset is a structured object that has a shape (explained in the chapter NOMENCLATURE of this guide).

This guide is arranged for easy understanding of the functions and for full utilization of the ASPL interpreter in performing operations on grouped data. The manuscript was produced with the author's private typesetter program, ppages (programmer's pages), a powerful formatting toolkit that runs on UNIX systems.

At your fingertips is the premier set-calculator that provides intuitive symbolic operations for set calculations. To best understand a calculator is to use it.

Bassem W. Jamaleddine
November 23 2025
New York, NY

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