On 04/11/2013 04:37 AM, neville holmes wrote:
When I suggested using colouring as an option under user control to bring the . and : suffixed symbols down to a single character, this was to simplify the J symbol set for a general readership. Simplification is very important for general acceptance
I agree that J's longevity will depend upon it's adoption by more people, programmers and non-programmers alike.
I do not agree that using symbols instead of digraphs and trigraphs is less simple, and thus will reduce its adoption rate.
If the symbols that are available within J are a closer match to the symbols used in many applied mathematics disciplines, such as physics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, etc., then the adoption rate should be much higher than if the practitioners in those disciplines all had to learn J's unique set of digraphs and trigraphs.
There is a path towards increased simplicity and adoption that has already been paved by the applications that support localizations with multi-byte character sets (e.g., Japanese, Chinese, etc.)
There are font sets already defined, and used by many applications, that include most of the common mathematical symbols that are currently not usable by J, but could be. Of course, new symbols can be created, but every attempt should be made to use symbols already being used by various applications of mathematics. This will make a more firm bridge for adoption by practitioners of these disciplines, even if they have to learn a few new symbols unique to J.
All Chinese and Japanese users of computers have been using input methods that allow multi-character input to represent symbols, without necessarily having access to specialized keyboards. You can see Japanese technophiles (non-programmers, though) walking around with their cell phones, typing in codes directly for the characters they are texting. Japan and China have one of the largest populations of cell phone texters in the world, so their adoption of that technology does not appear to be limited by these kinds of input methods.
If you are a current J user and comfortable with its digraphs and trigraphs, then J should continue to support that.
On the other hand, if you would like to be able to have your J session presented in a more aesthetically pleasing way, with the common math symbols (e.g., pi, sum, integral, differential, etc.), it is possible, and should not detract from those who prefer the ASCII set.
I think this approach to multi-modal input and multi-modal display for J will increase J's appeal to a broader base of users.
One of the nice things about using Mathematica, once you get over its cost, is how pleasing to the eye are the Notebooks -- precisely because the implementors (Wolfram, et. al.) intentionally supported a display that matches -- as much as possible -- the typography of mathematics.
Would it be such a bad thing for J to support mathematical typography also? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
