No, it won't cancel "any" (by which I mean "all") of the advantage.
But yes, it will lose SOME. It's a tradeoff.
...
It seems reasonable that the people motivated to have a non-ASCII input
and presentation mode for J should develop a working prototype, or work
with someone who has the skills to do it, so that all of these
discussions on an "ideal symbols for J" can be evaluated through actual
usage and practice, instead of ideology.
J is open-sourced now, so it is a "simple matter of programming" now to
implement this idea for an alternative input method and presentation for J.
It's not much different than using Japanese on a romaji keyboard:
Switching to hiragana input method, and typing the syllables for certain
kanji, with an auto-completing mode displaying the appropriately
matching kanji for a given kana.
For example, if I enter the "ta" and "be" characters, the autocompleter
should show not only the hiragana and katakana syllables for "ta" and
"be", but also the kanji for "tabe" (to eat).
Similarly, the alternative J input method might have allow one to enter
"i", which could be a simple variable by itself, the start of a longer
variable name, or the beginning of a J symbol: i. -> iota, i: -> steps.
Entering "!" would show auto-completions of "factorial", "fit ("!.") or
"foreign" ("!:").
If you have not experienced an input method like this, you should try it
out on a Mac or Linux box. It's very similar to what IDEs do for
auto-completing method names on certain programming languages.
Best,
Alan
PS: Even if this discussion leads to a good alternative input method
implementation, there is still a ton of work involved in transcribing
(or rerendering) all the existing J symbols (digraphs and trigraphs)
into the new symbols (whatever they may turn out to be).
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
