Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote: > This is nice but avoids the hard parts of the problem.
Sure, it's a proof of concept rather than an implementation. It serves a different purpose -- rather than solving the entire problem, it solves the problem of people doubting whether it would really look and feel OK. > "*:" is "square". Or, how about (^ ^. ^:) as "power", "log" and "power > conjunction"? The APL characters, as pretty as they are, lose these > relations between concepts All great questions, and I think they make it clear that there is a _cost_ to making the overlay pretend that "J is APL". One response to your questions would be to accept the cost (and just use APL anyhow, losing functionality in the process); another extreme would be to invent a whole new character set that _really_ speaks to J; and there's a whole range in the middle where we use APL's form but allow ourself to differ (for example, I don't know APL, but I see that @ and @: differ by @: having an umlaut, which seems to me to represent J's way of typing things; whereas grade-down and up use the APL symbols that I do vaguely remember, and differ totally visually from the adverbs / and \). Your questions are different, and would have to be answered according to the overall architecture. I think I'd most like an architecture based on letting J be less APL-like and more its own language. But that's natural for me, since I don't gain any benefit from APL, since I never really learned it. -Wm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
