> From: Ian Clark > > Thanks for directing me to the Discussion (as a wiki page). Is that > where we should offer our two-penn'orth from now on?
Good question. That's something I've always battled with. I prefer to discuss things on the email list, but especially in a long thread (with many side discussions which probably should have their own subject) it can get hard to find the important points that get made/agreed upon. That's for me where a documentation of the thread pulling out the main points is good. It seems to me that the other advantage of a wiki page is when a group are working towards a final product (in this case a list of names), it is possible to continually edit that list until it is in its final form. > 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? It would be nice to add to the wiki page the suggested html entity names of each of the symbols. It is a good idea and I did briefly explore it, but the list I found at the time didn't have the entity values of many of the symbols. Prompted by your post I've found better lists, but none that give (for example) an entity name for solid vertical bar. The other thing I'm not sure about is that it seems that some of the html entity names map to Unicode symbols/values, rather than ASCII ones. If they aren't ASCII values then I'm not sure if it is a good idea to use them. > 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. If we edit the final list on the wiki rather than add new ones then at least we will have a definitive list of the mappings. If someone needs a script then I'm sure that wouldn't be hard, especially since we could use the existing mapping of symbols to Dictionary page names as a starting point. More generally, with the wiki and the Addon library we can have anything we want available, as long as someone (or some group) decides it is important enough to put the time in to creating it. > 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
