Looking at "Alphabet and Words" in help states that letters are only
standard ASCII. It also refers to "graphics" for primitives. Where
unicode extentions fall is not clear. If the extentions are considered
"graphics" then the would be avaliable for alternate primitive names.
However, I suspect that more than likely they would be considered as
letters making them available for assignment.
So, if they are letters, then one should be able to say something like
÷ =: % NB. Where the ÷ is a unicode representation (best I can do
with Netscape)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
My personal preference is not to have Greek or other symbols back by using
a unicode font, I really liked the one character is a primitive of APL and
I would prefer the same with the ASCII J. For that reason I prefer K.
Additional primitives are reserved words (like the quad functions of APL).
The number of primitives has increased astonishingly in J over the years
and replacing them by symbols would not reduce the confusion but the
"duet" or "cartouche" are not making life any easier is my point.
Paul Gauthier
APL Software Developer - Senior
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone: 312-739-3467
Fax: 312-739-3496
CheckFree. The Company that Powers Payment on the WebSM.
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"Gilles Kirouac" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
04/04/2006 11:26 AM
Please respond to
Beta forum <[email protected]>
To
Beta forum <[email protected]>
cc
Subject
Re: [Jbeta] Enhancement Request 2006-04-01
I learnt J slowly over a period of about ten years. The main difficulty
has NOT been the character set. It is a difficulty yes, but easily solved
by having the J Vocabulary page close by (have a few in the house
for the first few months; put one in your washroom!).
A challenge is differentiating new entities: hook, Atop and Compose;
I had to build myself a card with examples. The Fork construct is easy.
For an APLer, the "preference" of verbs for items takes some time getting
used to.
The main difficulty is the application of the rank of a verb and
its pervasiveness through every conjunction. As Björn noted,
that might be easier for those familiar with Sax.
Allowing some APL characters could be an attractive factor, a marketing
tool, but I too think it would add confusion. Creating new Unicode
characters to be synonyms with the current ascii graphics could be
investigated, but the current state is at least satisfactory.
Gilles
---------- Original Message -----------
From: "Björn Helgason" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Beta forum" <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, 3 Apr 2006 17:41:39 +0000
Subject: Re: [Jbeta] Enhancement Request 2006-04-01
Even if you change the J operations to greek it would still be different
from most APLs
They are of course different from each other so the difference is
not as great with Sax as most of the others but even that would not
help you much having greek characters
The confusion of learning J is enough so that you would not add
greek chars in and the beauty of being able to use any editor and
mix in with other environments would be lost for many those using
greek chars
I would consider this to be better left as 1.april
2006/4/2, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
2 April, 2006
Well, I definitely don't consider this to be a 1st of April joke. The
idea
has crossed my brain many times not only for APL compatibility
reasons,
but
every time I use a { instead of a } or I write := instead of =: or
when
I come up with {.@;:.,,]_ and it should have been [;@:,;_1"@ .... :-)
If using Unicode for verbs and nouns would be allowed I myself would
use
fonts with really "expressive" characters like the SIL Yi and the SIL
Vai.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=SILYi_home
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=SILVai_Features
New symbols that don't have any "predefined" meaning are easy to
remember
because they pop in to a "empty" place in your brain, it seems. At
least
they don't start a long association process every time you see them...
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.
Regards,
Gerald
--
Gerald Mylog - a 5100 guy :-)
...
------- End of Original Message -------
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