PMA <[email protected]> wrote: > Yes, if the relatedness within each primitive set gets lost, > won't a need for 3-to-6 times the number of J primitives > virtually cancel any one-token-per-command advantage?
No, it won't cancel "any" (by which I mean "all") of the advantage. But yes, it will lose SOME. It's a tradeoff. By even CONSIDERING this we're making a different tradeoff -- right now it's perfectly obvious what to type in order to get each J primitive. We're talking about building an editor mode in which it's no longer obvious. Tough choice! Actually we could build a quick mockup using unicode of a graphics set that makes a different tradeoff -- simply make the : operators mean "place an umlaut above the preceding character", and the dot operators mean "place a single dot above the preceding character." (Well, it's ALMOST that simple -- obviously there'd have to be special cases for dotted forms of i and tall characters.) The result would probably look OK and be very clear on how to type. It might be worth a quick mockup by someone who knows Unicode (and J) well enough to make a fakeup and a screenshot. (Unicode can overstrike characters, and a decent or good Unicode editor will display a good-looking glyph for a lot of combinations that one might not expect if one didn't know how many combinations are useful in different languages.) We'd gain a single-glyph representation without losing the obvious "how to type". We'd lose the iconicity -- but then, is it REALLY iconic? Even relatively clear glyphs like grade-down are more memorable than they are _obvious_. My guess is that the ideal will be somewhere between the extremes: (Unfortunately, different people will benefit differently, but that's unavoidable -- but I also guess that everyone can get 80% of the maximum benefit from a single choice.) Extreme1: all exact APL characters. Extreme2: all ASCII (as now). Extreme3: all "joined" ASCII. Extreme4: all newly invented characters (or animations, etc). I strongly suspect Extreme4 would be unpleasant. I suspect Extreme3 wouldn't be bad. We all know Extreme2 is perfectly fine :-). But I imagine that Extreme3 might make a nice starting point for some *slight* adaptations, like using the less-or-equal sign for <:. Or... Maybe Unicode has an easily available less-than-or-equal with the bar on the top, or a broken bar on the top, and maybe that would work just as well. I don't know. -Wm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
