Everyone seems to be talking about different issues than the one I was
addressing on this thread. I would greatly appreciate help from anyone who
is willing to read the paper and commented on it.
In my proposal, nothing changes for J programmers. Keying is
done in identical ASCII, storage is done in identical ASCII, transmission
between systems is done in identical ASCII, mailing is done in identical
ASCII and every user of J continues using ASCII in exactly the same way
without knowing that anything has happened. The change is transparent and
causes none of the difficulties that are being discussed.
The change is solely intended to assist those who are learning Mathematics
and very casual users of J. It allows them, in effect, to say to the system:
"When you come to write my J language statements to the screen or to the
printer, I want you to look up every two character primitive in which the
second character is a "." or a ":", in a table and use the special symbol
you find there instead - that's all. This is easy to do.
There is a second component to the proposal to do with adding a second kind
of fork. Again, it is an addition that no J programmer need know
anything about or ever use. It is proposed that for this fork any J
expression is permitted on either branch of the fork and to the left of the
fork - not just a verb. This makes it lot easier to parallel mathematical
formulae in tacit programming for those learning to apply mathematical
formulae.
The handwritten script I posted was a mess and the pdf form was not popular.
I have created the primitive symbols in Paint and added them into a word
document. This revised paper has now replaced the previous one at:
http://bcompanion.com/Compromisedoc.doc
Thanks
Don Watson
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