On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Don Watson <[email protected]> wrote: > I also changed my table for translating u. or u: primitives into a > single meaningful primitive. Last time I was assuming that the monadic form > and the dyadic form had to have the same symbol. That led to a real mess for > a couple of primitives trying to look like both. However, the system knows > from the context whether the primitive is monadic or dyadic. Where > necessary, it can have a different symbol for each. A new table is at: > > http://www.bcompanion.com/EquivalentSymbols > > Comments would be helpful on these symbols. I am trying to improve in > response to your comments.
I have installed microsoft's word viewer so I can read this properly. I have only one comment: The first example in your table became " " when I try copying and pasting it into this message. This means you have not even begun to tackle the hard problem of figuring out how this kind of thing could even be possible. That said, as a sketch... well... it looks like a sketch. It has some inviting possibilities. But I really have nothing useful to say because I can not distinguish any problems but the largest problem from a sketch. And I believe I have already identified the largest problem. Once you have identified characters we could perhaps look at whether those characters are well supported and whether the look wrong in some fonts and so on. I know you are attempting to circumvent the "can not type them reliably" problem by saying that people will type something else which J will convert to these characters. I think this will make them hard to learn though -- it would basically be the same approach as LaTeX, so why not just use LaTeX for that? (Well, LaTeX allows too many possibilities and has too small of an audience and can be hard for an eager potential new programmer to install and get working). But anyways, I do not think we can ignore the keyboarding and communications problems -- today's new scheme/proposal would have issues with learning which can perhaps be solved but hopefully even if we had a system designed on the "I type E and I get Everything" principle we would still be able to copy and paste our program text into email messages and mail them and hopefully our readers would be able to see and manipulate what we wrote without having to have installed special software. Anything else, I think, sets the bar too high, for most new programmers. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
