The pencil and paper idea is good but not electronically transferable
without going back to the picture idea.
I've had a similar problem with the APL special characters - I was going to
show something to someone on
my own laptop but then realized how useless it would be for him as I didn't
have APL keycaps - he would be
unable to experiment with what I showed him without some clumsy intermediary
like a picture of the APL keyboard.
As I've stated many times, I really like the look of the APL characters but
am happy not to have to deal with the
endless glitches they cause.
Even though it's been years since I last used APL extensively, the character
set bit me again just the other day.
I have some J code I re-wrote from APL years ago but I saved a few pieces of
the APL code in my J script file to remind myself of a couple of features I
had not implemented from the APL version. The other day, I was copying this
code into a Word document to get a prettier printout than is possible with
plain text. However, my attempt to copy it into the buffer from emacs
failed with a mysterious error message, something like "Args out of range:
#^[t nil nil nil...."
Eventually, I tracked down the problem to that embedded piece of APL: some
combination of special characters apparently confuses emacs.
On 1/5/08, Randy MacDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Happy New Year Raul;
>
> I wonder if you tried pencil&paper, or dry-erase marker & whiteboard, or
> even the characters as presented in the default font?
>
> I have not had much luck with 'let me take over your machine to demo
> this wonderful new thing.' myself.
>
> Raul Miller wrote:
> > On Dec 26, 2007 11:16 PM, Randy MacDonald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> >> That APL source code is in a hard-to-extract format, a workspace, seems
>
> >> to me a red herring. The symbols shoehorned into the ANSI characters
> of
> >> text-mode DOS were no big deal either: I still think of "square root"
> >> as "rho" and "gamma" as "iota"
> >>
> >
> > Ok, but I tried to get a friend to read some APL code I had written,
> which
> > I thought was pretty simple and illustrated a point.
> >
> > He did not want to have to install any new fonts, and when I said I
> > could send him an image, he just flat out refused, and that was the
> > end of that conversation.
> >
> >
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> |\/| Randy A MacDonald | APL: If you can say it, it's done.. (ram)
> |/\| ramacd <at> nbnet.nb.ca |
> |\ | | The only real problem with APL is that
> BSc(Math) UNBF'83 | it is "still ahead of its time."
> Sapere Aude | - Morten Kromberg
> Natural Born APL'er |
> -----------------------------------------------------(INTP)----{ gnat }-
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
--
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
----------------------------------------------------------------------
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