I deeply mourn the passing (well almost) of the APL character set. Such
a well-thought-out set of symbols coupled [tripled?] with an equally
well-thought-out language and award-winning brilliant mainframe
timesharing implementations: IBM, Burroughs, et al. should have some
kind of future.
It seems the beautiful APL symbols (and consequently the language) lost
out to a short-lived technical limitation. The language-hard-core guys
seemed to accept the failure of the character set and go for a
'quick-fix' which limited itself to the ancient ASCII character set.
ASCII is(was) limited, ambiguous [ANSI, ?] and offers no room for expansion.
Specialist keyboards and mappings can be bought for a song these days.
For all of J's powerful syntactic innovations and improved
programability IT IS NOT PRETTY! J looks like a dog's breakfast.
Jim Field
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