"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I know that Ken thought that it was a mistake to use the Greek characters in > APL. I think it was a mistake to think it was a mistake. But there will of > course always be those who think it is a mistake to think it was a mistake > to think it was a mistake... > > I miss those Greek characters because they are just as easy to remember as > road signs. They don't have to be decoded or parsed. That's a good thing > with road signs.
I also think that the APL character set looks "cool". However, if you use any letters in any alphabet that already have pre-defined meanings, you are bound to run into ambiguities if both of those meanings can occur simultaneously. For example, APL uses alpha=x. omega=y. iota=i. epsilon=e. and rho=$ approximately (not to mention capital Delta), but those Greek letters already have pre-defined meanings - they are legitimate letters in the Greek alphabet. This would not normally pose a problem - but if the programmer is Greek and wants to use Greek letters in his variable names, it can become a great problem. What would you think of a programming language that allows you to program in many different languages - Korean, Sanscrit, even Tolkien's runes - but NOT in Greek? One way around this is that Unicode has special code-points for many (but not all) of the Greek symbols; unfortunately, there is nothing that says that these Greek symbols should look any different than normal Greek letters, so if you mixed them together, it would be very difficult to visually discern primitives from parts of an identifier (This can already be problematic between using I, l, and 1 in some fonts, and can be even worse if someone mixes Latin A, Greek A, and Cyrillic A, all of which look identical but have different code points. Then again, doing something like that is very bad coding practice just ASKING for trouble, but for a Greek programmer to use real Greek words is something one should naturally expect to be a legitimate thing to do.) There is one other problem that happens if you use APL characters for J primitives. A small number of APL symbols that look like ASCII characters have been re-assigned, and different symbols mapped onto those ASCII characters. For example: APL x = J * = multiply APL * = J ^ = power APL ^ = J *. = and If you allow both APL and J symbols to coexist, what should * and ^ mean? -- Mark D. Niemiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
