Having published a paper about APL fonts (APL Pi presented
at APL81) and produced several different APL fonts (e.g.
ones used in the IBM Systems Journal edition celebrating the
25th anniversary of APL and "History of Computer Architecture"
by Blaauw and Brooks) I do have an interest/love for APL
characters - (both the font kind and the people kind :)
However - I don't understand what people are thinking about
with recent discussion/proposals. I agree with Roger that
+/ and */ convey a concept better than Sigma and Pi - and
indeed, as he asks, "What about *./ etc.?"
The comments below bring up a couple of issues - assume that
we had arrow for "gets", is that a replacement for =. or =: ?
(I suppose we could have a double line arrow) It seems that
iota always pops up in these conversations - any suggestions
for symbols to represent i: or I. which are nicely related
in j ?? Maybe the proposal is that a "symbolic j" be
restricted to the definitions in APL? That would seem a big
step backwards...
All of this begs the issue that not only is it hard to
communicate using these symbols (I'm not even trying in this
message) the results are just plain UGLY in terms of display.
(this may be a bias from the hundreds of hours I have spent
in trying to make APL characters look nice) My opinion of
the unicode APL characters is that they look like a ransom
note font (i.e. one clipped from various sources to obscure
where they were produced).
Much as I love APL characters, I don't miss them in j.
- joey
At 18:55 +0100 2007/02/07, Markus Triska wrote:
Don Guinn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
But what I really want is some "officially recognized" unicode APL
font/character set.
Using
http://stud4.tuwien.ac.at/~e0225855/unicapl/unicapl.html
(which is mentioned in the "Unicode" section of the APL language FAQ),
you can enter Unicode APL characters in Emacs, by using only ASCII
characters; for example: {iota} for ?, {times} or {x} for Å~, {assign}
or {gets} for Å©, {drop} for Å´, etc. Many of them are "official" in the
sense that "APL" is explicitly contained in the official description
of the Unicode codepoint. All of them are below 25CC.
All the best,
Markus Triska
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