>From *Remembering Ken Iverson <http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#chars>*:
Example 0: For the first few months, the special APL characters and the ASCII spelling co-existed in the system. It was Ken who first suggested that I should kill off the special APL characters. I myself resisted for a few weeks longer, until the situation became too confusing, for reasons described in *J for the APL Programmer* [35, p. 11]. The referenced text can be found in *J for the APL Programmer*<http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/j4apl.htm>, Terminology and spelling. On Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 5:30 PM, PMA <[email protected]> wrote: > Hmm. When you and Ken Iverson were gestating J, how close > to a toss-up did the ASCII-vs-APL-characters issue ever come? > > Roger Hui wrote: > >> APL characters has conceptual _problems_. Suppose you invented a new >> super >> duper function or operator, but the existing chars in Unicode set don't >> really fit, or don't fit at all. An enervating discussion then ensues on >> how you denote this new function or operator. >> >> For instance, how would you denote I. (interval index) or i: (index of >> last)? >> > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
