On Wed, 3 Apr 2013, Greg Borota wrote:
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
mu
ch, 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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Greg,
This would be a wonderful thing, but I'm afraid some may`
be less than enthusiastic. When I first came to J many
years ago, I had used APL a bit. I missed the symbols and
expressed hope for something like what you propose.
The response was not positive, and I came to realize that
the decision to abandon Ken's original character set and
use ASCII was hard but necessary -- in fact, the lovely
APL characters were a major obstacle in the adoption and use
of the language. So no one wanted to drag that up again.
But... the APL character set is *beautiful*! Right now I
have an evaluation copy of APLX (MicroAPL for Mac) running
on this MacBook Pro. I will not purchase it because (1) it's
to expensive for a toy, and (2) the language differs enough
from J that you can't just translate code automatically. And
I like the J language better than APL: the differences were
introduced by Ken and Roger for good, logical reasons.
However, I have come to realize that I use J even for cases
were other languages would be a better choice -- and I do that
on aesthetic grounds -- other languages just seem so bloated
and ugly! My dream would be to have J expressible in APL-like
characters (there isn't a one-to-one correspondance, though
most symbols could be carried over). Then J could have two
forms, like hieroglyphic and demotic Egyptian: ASCII J for use
in emails & everywhere, and APL-like J for use on your main
machine: more compact and beautiful to look at. I really hope
that such a project gets under way. There would be lots of
choices to be made, and the symbol set could even be expanded
beyond what APL has. Aesthetic considerations are not just
superficial -- why did Knuth spend all those years on TeX?
Patrick
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