The answer to the last question in your message is, probably not. :-) The design process of APL/J can be illustrated by a couple of stories, and a couple of papers. The paper are:
- *The Evolution of APL <http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLEvol.htm>, *especially the Transcript of Presentation. - *A Personal View of APL<http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLPersonalView.htm> * And the stories: - http://keiapl.org/anec/#sort One of Ken’s masterstrokes in J was to redefine the dyad grade so that x/:y is x indexed by the grade of y , which means that to sort y you can say y/:y . Sometime later in a presentation Chris Burke showed a list of uses of the adverb ~ (reflexive/passive). Now the monad f~ y is defined to be y f y , and in Chris’ list he had /:~y to sort y . Ken was startled when he saw this. (He didn’t know?! I would give Ken the benefit of every doubt and assume that he probably did know. But suppose he really didn’t know. That would make the design of x/:y even more incredible.) A subsequent extension imposed a total array ordering<http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/The_TAO_of_J> in J, which means that the monadic and right domain of /: are all the arrays, whence /:~ sorts all arrays — any rank, any type. - http://keiapl.org/anec/#principles Different people claiming to follow the same broad principles may well arrive at radically different designs; an appreciation of the actual role of the principles in design can therefore be communicated only by illustrating their application in a variety of specific instances. It must be remembered, of course, that in the heat of battle principles are not applied as consciously or systematically as may appear in the telling. — *The Design of APL* <http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLDesign.htm>, 1973 Now regarding the introduction of special symbols. The J ASCII spelling was designed specifically for the 7-bit ASCII character set, as the *APL\360 * notation was designed for the technology available at the time. I feel sure that if Ken were designing a language for UNICODE, he would do it specifically for UNICODE, and not just map the J ASCII spelling to the nearest UNICODE equivalent. Of course, there is nothing to say that you have to approach the problem the way Ken would have. Finally, an anecdote. I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy tablet. Wonderful toy, except that it does not display APL characters, at least not "right out of the box". Do y'all really want to deal with that kind of headache? On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 9:05 AM, Steven Taylor <[email protected]> wrote: > On 10 April 2013 15:41, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > > I've spent a lot of time nibbling away at the edges of this very problem. > > > sometimes it makes sense: http://lesscss.org/. Sometimes not: > https://github.com/kripken/emscripten/wiki. For some crazy reason this > one > appeals to me: http://trydecaf.org/. ... and this is just scratching the > surface ;-) > > Whenever someone get's deeply into language design, it's a good thing. > There's lots to discover that you only realise through doing... hacking... > or even (perish the thought) designing. There's something about APL / J / > K that I don't get. Is it true that a lot of these innovations occurred in > short time periods? I've heard a few comments and got that sense now and > then. If so, we're not dealing with evolution or design by committee, but > something else that hopefully Catherine will help us understand better > through her documentary. Maybe someone could write a book about, "Is there > hope for mortals?" > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
