Hello James;
Cannot all of these problems be solved by allowing Unicode identifiers,
and just redefining:
{ times sign } =: *
{ rho } =: $
{ square root } =: %:
{ ceiling } =: >.
{ floor } =: <.
Now that's what I call Unicode support!
James C Field wrote:
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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|\/| Randy A MacDonald | APL: If you can say it, it's done.. (ram)
|/\| ramacd <at> nbnet.nb.ca |
|\ | | The only real problem with APL is that
BSc(Math) UNBF'83 | it is "still ahead of its time."
Sapere Aude | - Morten Kromberg
Natural Born APL'er |
-----------------------------------------------------(INTP)----{ gnat }-
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