Very amusing!

But what about B, C, D, E, F, G, K (an APL derivative), L (several), R, S, T (a 
Scheme dialect) to name a few?

Seriously now, APL had special keyboards with the symbols which were wondrous 
to behold. And indeed, J was constructed in recognition of the divine 
impracticality of it:

>From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_%28programming_language%29

To avoid repeating the APL special-character problem, J requires only the basic 
ASCII character set, resorting to the use of the dot and colon as 
"inflections"[7] to form short words similar to digraphs. Most such "primary" 
(or "primitive") J words serve as mathematical symbols, with the dot or colon 
extending the meaning of the basic characters available. Additionally, many 
characters which might need to be balanced in other languages (such as [] {} "" 
`` or <>) are treated by J as stand-alone words or, when inflected, as 
single-character roots of multi-character words.

But in fact, we used to use APL with plain ASCII keyboards – worked just fine. 
And to be somewhat less Off Topic, the purpose of our using APL was for early 
research and development in computer music and synthesis software at The 
University of Melbourne here in Australia. APL class languages are particularly 
nicely suited to algorithmic music composition work.

Andrew



On 25/08/2015 14:28, "David Kastrup" 
<lilypond-user-bounces+andrew.bernard=gmail....@gnu.org on behalf of 
d...@gnu.org> wrote:

It is fitting that the language name is now a single character.  I am
just surprised that it is one in the ASCII character set.


_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user

Reply via email to