Edn 2 (draft) of APWJ by Eugene McDonnell (p280) invites readers to enter the expression:
suits=: 7&u: '♣♦♥♠' For readers of the ebook version, this expression copy/pastes nicely into the J session and behaves as expected. But novice readers of the paperback version may wonder how they can be expected to type ♣♦♥♠ without having keytops labelled ♣, ♦, ♥ and ♠. Short of directing readers to http://unicode.org/charts/ and inviting them to hunt/copy/paste ♣ etc (and I wouldn't know where to start looking... what alphabet is it, please?), I don't know how to answer this (a) succintly in the present example, eg to assign (suits=:...) using only ascii, (b) in general. Suggestions please? Another thing. The novice may well ask, why not: (suits=: '♣♦♥♠')? A footnote with a brief but clear explanation of why ($'♣♦♥♠') is not 4 but 12 would be helpful. (I don't consider the one-word answer utf8 to be an "explanation".) And has anyone written a unicode browser in J (the simpler the better) to insert a chosen char into the J window which works a bit like Menu > Insert > Symbol... in MSWord? If we have a Wiki page for it, it would be a courtesy to have a footnote directing readers there. Ian Clark for Vector Books. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
