I have been following the Symbols thread with somewhat mixed feelings. My first acquaintance with APL was in the mid '60s when the original box notation was used with spectacular success to formally describe the System/360 (see the IBM Systems Journal, Vol.3, No.3, 1964).
My first use of APL was with the IBM 2741 terminal run from a 360/67 in the early '70s. The golf-ball print head on the 2741 made use of the APL symbols easy, but when the 2260 screen terminal came in, the IBM developers at Kingston needed a great amount of pressure before they would support APL. When I retired from IBM and went to Tasmania to teach, I reluctantly switched to J only because I couldn't get the APL interpreter to work on the PCs available to me. However I soon realised that J was easier to get over to students, partly because of the ASCII character set usage, partly because of using scripts instead of workspaces, partly because of the possibilities of tacit encoding. This background perhaps explains why the elaborate changes being discussed seem to me to be unwise if there is any serious hope of (a) keeping existing users all happy, and (b) making it easier to bring in new users. Also, my 30 years experience as a systems engineer taught me that success comes with improvements that are incrementally and compatibly introduced. This is a general observation that politicians and bureaucrats choose to ignore. All that said, one improvement I would very much like to see in J is the introduction of the saltire and obelus (how do I get these symbols into plain text here?) as alternatives to the * and % symbols. That J was forced into using * and % instead of the traditional symbols is a condemnation of the people who left them out of ASCII. Disgraceful !!! Note that compatibility would be preserved by retaining the * and % symbols, but perhaps automatically replacing them in displayed J expressions. This small modification would make it much easier to get schoolchildren and other ordinary potential users into using J for everyday calculations. Oh, and someone complained that using the . and : to expand the primitive symbol set was bad because they are too small to see easily. Alright then, why not simply display them as larger dots when used in primitive function symbols? Mind you, the same problem arises with the use of . as a decimal point. Neville Holmes ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
