Pairwise local alignment is an indispensable tool for molecular biologists. In real time (i.e. in about 1 s), ALP (Ascending Ladder Program) calculates the E-values for protein-protein or DNA-DNA local alignments of random sequences, for arbitrary substitution score matrix, gap costs and letter abundances, and FALP (Frameshift Ascending Ladder Program) performs a similar task, although more slowly, for frameshifting DNA-protein alignments.