Thanks for directing me to the Discussion (as a wiki page). Is that where we should offer our two-penn'orth from now on?
As soon as I posted I realised what I wanted to see was not "official" Jword names but a well-behaved expansion of the ascii primitives forming them. Like: greaterthandot. A variant of Option 1 (qv) in fact. One gotcher has quickly emerged, whose importance shouldn't be too lightly dismissed. Others are doubtless lurking. This raises a festering pimple of a problem: calling each ascii character by its Right Name -- whatever that is. Only people who've worked both sides of the Pond seem to recognise this as an issue. Thus in England, Hash # is never called Pound because that's a separate symbol £ -- even if it is non-ascii. Observation[1]: w3.org came up with standard names for the so-called html "entities", eg & > < which are hard to quarrel with. Why don't we use these names? Observation[2]: Can we have the final consensus of ascii names made available as a script? Something which will definitively turn "[:" say into "lbraccolon" (or whatever). It's hard to keep up with an emerging standard in the form of a trail of comments. Since ascii is so important for the definition of J, it seems an omission that JSoftware doesn't promote its own preferred (long and short) names for *all* the ascii chars, and those confusable with them, like the subasciis, the various quotes, also solid vertical bar vs split vertical bar. (APL doesn't either -- but that's another story.) Ian On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:34 AM, Sherlock, Ric <[email protected]> wrote: > Using purely alpha names is an option, but I'd prefer Raul's suggestion[1] to > choosing just one name. > > [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/Discussion > > I'm thinking that most of the time the problem with the trailing . and : etc > won't be a problem. AFAICS it is only email clients that try to be too smart. > Then again perhaps that is enough! > >> From: Ian Clark >> >> That's what I thought at first. But google (trying to recognise a >> link) omitted the final dot. >> >> Can I suggest we use alpha names only? Like "ceiling" instead of >> "greaterthan." ? I know primitives can have multiple names, but does >> it matter if we just hit on one? >> >> Ian >> >> >> On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 4:07 AM, Fraser Jackson >> <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Hi Ric, >> > >> > Your wiki page seems not to be there >> > >> > Fraser >> > ----- Original Message ----- >> > From: "Sherlock, Ric" <[email protected]> >> > To: "Programming forum" <[email protected]> >> > Sent: Wednesday, February 03, 2010 4:51 PM >> > Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] The Accessible Dictionary >> > >> > >> >>I thought working on a page might help us reach a consensus for how >> they >> >>should look and what should be on them. >> >> >> >> I chose something easy to start with: >. >> >> >> >> http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/greaterthan. >> >> >> >> I've also created a draft template we can use for other similar >> primitive >> >> pages: >> >> >> >> http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/PrimitiveTemplate >> >> >> >> This should help save effort when creating a new page as well as >> help >> >> maintain some consistency. >> >> >> >> Please feel free to discuss improvements or make them directly on >> the wiki >> >> page(s). It is easy to revert changes or view previous versions for >> >> comparison using the Info link at the top of the page. >> >> >> >> -------------------------------------------------------------------- >> -- >> >> For information about J forums see >> http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > >> > >> > --------------------------------------------------------------------- >> - >> > For information about J forums see >> http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
