As much as I love the APL symbols, the advantages of the J symbol set are formidable.
Take a look at the J vocabulary page - the entire language is laid out there. Take a moment to appreciate the carefully chosen relations between different variations of a given symbol. Looking at the "%" line just now, I notice that dyadic "%:" is generalized "root". On this one line, you go from simple inverse and divide, to matrix inverse and divide, to square root and general root. If you replace these combined characters with symbols, you hide these subtle relations between the functions. Admittedly, some of them are contrived, arbitrary or subject to the vagaries of historical expectations - I'm looking at you, "<" line. But what isn't? Our widely accepted, and overloaded equals sign "=" is based on a geometrical notion of parallel lines. Not only that, I've been dealing with the problems of the APL character set for close to 40 years now - just look at the problems I've had getting a good copy of Ken's 1980 Turing Award paper available - and I'm happy to leave that to others. I'm glad that's it's better than it used to be but it still requires most people to take several steps or put up with an ugly compromise. RIP. On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 10:51 PM, bill lam <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, 12 Mar 2009, Don Watson wrote: > > Unfortunately I am not an experienced J programmer, likely to quickly > > produce a simulation. I am new to J, but impressed with the advantages of > an > > ASCII keyboard. I only remember how quickly I learned APL 40 years ago; > > although J can express harder things much better, I perceive it harder to > > express simple things in J. > > I think that it is possible to use regex or J or APL to translate . > and : inflections to composite characters that you purposed. However > I also think that J developers will not consider that to be > cost-benefit to implement that just for attracting APLers. > Nevertheless you are welcomed to implement it by yourself and > contribute back to J community. > > -- > regards, > ==================================================== > GPG key 1024D/4434BAB3 2008-08-24 > gpg --keyserver subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 4434BAB3 > 唐詩226 王維 送別 > 山中相送罷 日暮掩柴扉 春草明年綠 王孫歸不歸 > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
