Donna wrote: > To be readable you need to be able to recognize the morphemes, > words, and sentences which is easy in APL and not so in J.
I agree. We notice this, and we also notice that this was a cost K. I. paid in moving his notation to ASCII. In comparing APL with J, the relative problems of J arise from the fact that J does more with less. The reliance on standard punctuation marks is doubly difficult. First, there is the clash with pre-established meaning. J primaries have been constructed quite cleverly, but the normal meanings of the components still tend to vie for attention. Second, punctuation marks tend to be slight and spare, and the interpretation of punctuation is aided by many aspects of the context in which it occurs. Leaning on these little things as heavily as J does runs contrary to what naturally evolves in manual writing. There are systematic reasons that many punctuation marks are little or relatively indistinguishable. Since APL symbols were designed for mnemonic clarity, their replacement with combinations of punctuation marks makes for a notation that is harder to read. This isn't news, and it isn't a scandal. I do think it will be possible to enhance J, symbolically, so that it reclaims benefits of classical APL. My vision is that each J primary will continue to be specified with basic text, but the resulting display will be an appropriately mnemonic glyph. The adjoining characters that make up primary tokens would, in such an interface, serve in a manner similar to the early APL overstrike combinations described recently in this forum. Wherever the insertion point occurs the literal J code would be seen, but otherwise it would have a visually 'translated' form. I don't think such a project is worth making a high priority, however. Even less do I think that it would make a major difference in how widely used J becomes. The niche status of APL indicates that an implementation of J that looked more like standard APL wouldn't wow the world at large. Tracy Harms P.S. I actually am not in a position to agree that recognizing words and sentences is *easy* in APL, as my skill in it is minimal. Yet, even given my standpoint of ignorance, APL does seem to radiate clarity. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
