Greg said: >This is what your line becomes after being filtered by an ascii editor (my main editor):
×÷=%_$~<>??¦??????¤«»¡¿ in the email source everything was binary (binHex`d) encoded. >If such is required for intelligent communication of J i personally do not want to take that step. Skip replies: Modern text editors & email systems will need to support all the world's languages and character sets. Adding just one more language, with yet another character set, should not be a problem. If it is a problem, we need to fix it. There is no technical reason it can't be fixed. Greg said: >At this point in the language J`s evolution i would like to see it solidified ... in as many platforms as possible. That requires stability not fragmentation in the base graphical structure. Skip replies: It seems to me that the J language is pretty stable, and has been that way for some years. I use J602 on my laptop regularly, and J on my Android phone, and they both serve my purposes nicely. There has been a lot of action recently, rebuilding J's front-end to adapt it to the browser-server paradigm, as well as to port it to new platforms like smartphones, but the core language hasn't changed much in awhile. Also, I wouldn't say that providing an optional single-glyph representation of J was "fragmentation" in J's graphical structure. What I am proposing is more like providing another font for the display of J, which can be turned on or off at any time. Thjis would be much like the various fonts in MS Word, which can alter the look of the text, but not change the meaning. Greg said: >i _would_ however like to see innovation _inspired_ by J. That _could_ be the design of a language which does take advantage of modern possibilities. Skip replies: i'm not sure I would be comfortable trying to change the underlying syntax and functionality of J. 60 years of polishing has made J an extremely concise and elegant language. All I was proposing to do to J would be to attempt to undo the forced changes that were made in the symbol set, caused by the limited availability of appropriate symbols in early hardware. The *logical symbol* set of J is fine. Its the *glyphs* that *make up* the current symbol set (ASCII characters) that could use a refresher, now that technology has removed the original restrictions Greg said: >Coming to mind is a 1.5 (like TeX) or 2D language (not successfully built yet). J has some interesting constructs in its syntax. Those might see a true flowering into a higher graphical level. Higher dimensionality would make it very easy to consider more than two input streams. What are those possibilities, and how can they be generated syntactically? Skip replies: Whew! that's a MUCH bigger step than what I was envisioning. I had two, much tinier, baby steps in mind: Step 1 - Come up with a regular expression that would replace J's one-and-two-ASCII-character primitives with single unicode symbols. To test this out, we could select a set of 120 or so arbitrary unicode characters NOT in the standard ASCII set, and put those arbitrary glyphs as the replacement characters in the regex. Then we place that regex in a standard text editor that supports regular expressions such as Notepad++ (Windows) or TextWrangler (Mac). This would allow us to take arbitrary J programs, paste them in the text editor, run the regex, and see what they look like with the single glyphs. This helps gets us started pretty easily, and would give us insight as to how the single-glyph J would look. A similar "reverse regex" could revert the single-glyph J back to the 1-2 ASCII symbol version. These two regexs would eventually become part of the core of a new ijx editor window that would support either notation. Step 2 - Once we are able to easily jump back and forth between single- and multiple-glyph J, we could begin to experiment with various glyphs to see which ones would best represent the functionality of each of J's primitives, as well as graphically suggest similarities among functionally-related primitives. I don't think we need to invent yet another matrix language. We just need to release J from the constraints it was placed under 30 years ago, due to hardware limitations. Skip On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 6:15 PM, greg heil <[email protected]> wrote: > Skip > > >This is what your line becomes after being filtered by an ascii editor > (my main editor): > > ×÷=%_$~<>??¦??????¤«»¡¿ > > in the email source everything was binary (binHex`d) encoded. > > >If such is required for intelligent communication of J i personally do > not want to take that step. > > >At this point in the language J`s evolution i would like to see it > solidified ... in as many platforms as possible. That requires stability > not fragmentation in the base graphical structure. > > >i _would_ however like to see innovation _inspired_ by J. That _could_ be > the design of a language which does take advantage of modern possibilities. > > >Coming to mind is a 1.5 (like TeX) or 2D language (not successfully built > yet). J has some interesting constructs in its syntax. Those might see a > true flowering into a higher graphical level. > > Higher dimensionality would make it very easy to consider more than > two input streams. What are those possibilities, and how can they be > generated syntactically? > > >i would hope that this concentration of energy we have here can be really > used for the next language (L?) > > greg > ~krsnadas.org > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Skip Cave Cave Consulting LLC Phone: 214-460-4861 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
