Visual Studio let's you take a plain ASCII file and display it however you
want. There is an elaborate API that one can tap into to customize how the file
gets displayed inside the editor. The editor is WPF based so there is no limit
to what one can display (you can display even movies :-) inside the editor). If
I find there is interest I could get enough motivation to create the support
for displaying plain ascii J file inside Visual Studio, where J verbs show up
as APL symbols. This J Editor can be hosted inside Visual Studio Professional
and higher. Or even in the free Visual Studio Shell - see
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1366 One could type i.
and Visual Studio could automatically display that as the equivalent APL
symbol. But to J engine only ascii would be passed. Also the file would be
saved as normal J ascii file. Depending on the level of interest I see, I could
to get a proof of concept pretty soon. The actual code should not take that
much, the
complicated API is more scary as is not too well documented - one has to
gather info from all over the web, scattered blogs and such. If this
implementation is done in C# then PInvoke wrapper is of great use. But if done
in C++ (which I would have no intention of doing) then the wrapper is not
needed...
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