I have been a fan of creating skins, AKA style sheets, for this sort of thing since the days of SHARP APL PC.
I like what Guy Steele did this way with Fortress: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_(programming_language) Ignoring, for the moment, the semantic differences between APLs and J, I think there may be virtue in, or at least insights from, creating a Rosetta Stone of this nature. Bob On 2021-05-01 6:56 a.m., Ric Sherlock wrote:
I've been using a font with ligature support in VSCode and Windows Terminal for a while now. It means for example that when I type the 2 characters >=, what displays on the screen is ≥. The 2 characters are there still and I can delete them individually to leave either the > or the =. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing) It's made me wonder whether there would be any merit in creating a font that would display J digraphs as single symbols. Obviously there'd be significant work/discussion in designing appropriate symbols, and I have no experience or real clue about how involved creating a font is, let alone one that optionally supports ligatures would be. According to one type designer it is a "terrible idea" for programming, but I still wonder! :-) https://practicaltypography.com/ligatures-in-programming-fonts-hell-no.html Thoughts? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
-- Robert Bernecky Snake Island Research Inc 18 Fifth Street Ward's Island Toronto, Ontario M5J 2B9 [email protected] tel: +1 416 203 0854 text/cell: +1 416 996 4286 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
