Yes, I'm afraid that this idea is a zombie that many
experienced Jer's wish would stay dead! But it is such
a beautiful corpse! My idea is not to make the symbol
set as close to APL as possible -- far from it. The APL
set was limited too, by the IBM typeball. While I don't
have a copy of "A Programming Language", this point was
made clear to me when I watched the (*must see*) interview
on "The Origins of APL - 1974", posted at
http://www.myspace.com/video/vid/60771080
At one point, discussing the code written to describe the
system 360, the "proto-APL" code is shown on the screen.
All those subscripts and superscripts! Great. Wouldn't it
be more economical to use superscripts for rank:
(verb)superscript 2 to represent (verb)"2 -- and maybe
a subscript for the left argument.. The idea would be to
design the most compact and expressive symbol set we could
imagine; at some point implementation will not be a problem.
I couldn't care less about confusing APLers (there aren't
that many anyway). Maybe a project for Sunday afternoons --
I could start by trying to convert a J script into TeX :-)
Patrick
P.S. To reveal how out of it I am, I have no idea what
Visual Studio is.
On Fri, 5 Apr 2013, Gilles Kirouac wrote:
Is great Visual Studio integration for J desirable? Definitely yes.
J using an enriched APL character set? I am not so sure.
Devon said it and I agree. IMO, APL characters for J is not
such a good idea.
At first glance, it appears doable and attractive to those who
have got used to the beauty and utility of the APL character set.
I thought so a while ago.
But J _is not_ APL. To deal with multidimensional args, APL adds
an axis to many operators, while J uses the notion of rank
with the execution of _every_ verb. Just think of $ Shape vs rau
(reshape in APL) which is a common pitfall for APLers coming to J.
APLers would believe they can write APL and execute it in J.
The resulting confusion would be immense and disserving everyone
in the long run.
The difficulty with the J Vocabulary is learning something new.
Once you do, the current vocabulary works well, _very_ well in fact,
and is not the major obstacle perceived by some APLers. Getting used
to the pervasiness of rank is much much more challenging.
~ Gilles
---------- Original Message -----------
From: Steven Taylor <[email protected]>
To: Programming forum <[email protected]>
Sent: Fri, 5 Apr 2013 17:59:40 +0100
Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] J and APL symbols
"Selling current J editors to somebody who is doing their
programming in Visual Studio all day long, it's a hard sell. They'll
most probably just laugh at you..."
For me, I don't mind making an exception when it comes to maths based
functional / vector based stuff... but opening up J to other
developers is a good thing.
biological memory goes further with J. Interestingly, some F# developers
go out of their way to switch off VS features. You may find a different
mindset at play in this space. I don't profess to know the
answer... just thought you might like to hear a few thoughts.
On 5 April 2013 07:43, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote:
Selling current J editors to somebody who is doing their programming in
Visual Studio all day long, it's a hard sell. They'll most probably just
laugh at you...
And when you deal with huge programs developed over timespans like years
and with many developers, biological memory starts to show its limits....
And then Intellisense, QuickInfo, quickly jumping around, etc. are your
friends on which you don't want to easily give up.
On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 12:46 AM, Steven Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:
I'd like better VS integration, but I can't really justify the effort
needed since JHS / GTK are refreshingly simple + cross-platform. I am
looking forward to trying out Chris' new IDE too. On APL symbols... I
still only know a few of them. Intellisense to the dictionary would be
more useful (ie. strengthen what is already working). More useful
again
would be Intellisense to J libraries.
On the dictionary, since in J we're talking about notation as a tool of
thought, and the vocabulary is small, isn't it better to commit this to
memory? Probably I'm forgetting how foreign this J vocabulary once
looked
to me.
On 4 April 2013 22:06, Greg Borota <[email protected]> wrote:
My work would be usable only by those who can run Visual Studio
binaries,
either the paid ones (preferably and easier) or the free Visual
Studio
Shell.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:01 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]>
wrote:
What Greg was describing would be optional (and out of scope for
many
users).
FYI,
--
Raul
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 4:50 PM, Peter B. Kessler
<[email protected]> wrote:
I hope you can make this kind of change uniform, so that if I
were
debugging
or tracing, etc., I saw my program in the same character set
that I
used
to
write my program. Otherwise I can't use the powerful parallel
processor
that is my vision system to match things up.
... peter
On 04/04/13 12:44, Greg Borota wrote:
What I have in mind is just a display thing. Say you Select All
and
Copy/Paste the content of the editor window, you still get ASCII
chars
only.
E.g: In GTK Term whenever you enter y as the verb argument it
changes
color
and becomes italic (at least under Windows). What if you were to
display
the omega character instead? But behind the scenes you still
hold
y
ASCII
char indeed. Maybe those who already worked on GTK editor could
add
their
feedback.
And this could be an optional setting which one could turn on
and
off
as
wanted. Just a display setting.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Devon McCormick <
[email protected]
wrote:
I'm not sure this is really such a good idea. J is its own
language
and
mapping some J symbols to APL ones could be misleading. Also,
as
much
as
I
like the look of APL, I'm happy not to deal with the continuing
hiccups
caused by the character set.
At last year's APL Moot, I showed my fellow mooters that I
could
cut
and
paste Chinese characters into an emacs session with no apparent
problem
but
some of the APL characters from a website did not come over
cleanly.
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Greg Borota <[email protected]>
wrote:
I think it might be a quicker path to use ASCII behind the
scenes
still
but
have some editor/term software (Visual Studio in this case)
display
words
of interest as APL symbols. Like in MS Word where you type (c)
and
it's
automatically displayed as Copyright Symbol ©.
This could even be an Options settings where one could turn it
on
and
off.
I think this is doable with reasonable effort with Visual
Studio,
but
I
am
thinking the idea could be used with Qt or GKT also. Unless I
am
missing
something which I might see only after starting the actual
implementation
:-)
I am very new to APL land, but I really liked the APL symbols.
When
I
first
started with computers I was puzzled why math symbols were not
used
by C
(C
was my first higher level language after Assembly)...
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 12:41 PM, PMA <
[email protected]
wrote:
What a wonderful idea! I wish I had
the competence & time to pursue it.
Pete
J. Patrick Harrington wrote:
... 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.
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--
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
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