Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

To: c...@jsoftware.com Subject: Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL? I have followed this galloping thread and finally nostalgia is causing me to add to the detritus. For the last 50+ entries in the thread, I've been wondering - Did this [d]evolving discussion answer the original questions, asked a mont

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The 3279 was not a graphical screen. To make graphics the graphics were made by creating fonts and then displaying the fonts and they presented the graphics. Not very efficient but it worked. Apls graphpak was great and way ahead of anything else. Apl and gddm really did wonders. On Sun, 17 Jun

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Check out Harold "Bud" Lawson's article, "The March into the Black Hole of Complexity" in the May 2018 issue of Communications of the ACM. Bob On 2018-06-18 11:01 AM, Ian Clark wrote: Hats Off to you, Joey, for some serious gap-filling. What's "Chat" for, if it isn't for war stories? This

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Hats Off to you, Joey, for some serious gap-filling. What's "Chat" for, if it isn't for war stories? This post will be one of my major references for my multi-volume work-in-progress: "The Paucity Of Evidence For Intelligent Design In The Evolution Of Computers." On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 4:43 AM,

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I have followed this galloping thread and finally nostalgia is causing me to add to the detritus. For the last 50+ entries in the thread, I've been wondering - Did this [d]evolving discussion answer the original questions, asked a month ago, by "Jane the novice of J" ? Or, did it cause Jane

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

When STSC came out with an APL for the PC I got quite good at reading the extended ASCII characters as their APL equivalent. It was really great when I finally broke down and bought the APL character generator chip from STSC. On Sun, Jun 17, 2018 at 10:26 AM Devon McCormick wrote: > The APL

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The APL print train we had on our IBM line-printers was adapted from a "library" chain because it had Greek letters on it. If you ever looked at the chain after it had been in use for a while, you would see one shiny, unused character on it: the lower-case lambda which was a remnant of the

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

For a long time equipment to get graphics off the screens were very expensive Had to learn to use cameras to take pictures of the screen. Experts on filters etc. On Sun, 17 Jun 2018 14:15 Robert Bernecky, wrote: > A few points: > > - The BGT (Blasted Goldball Terminals) were indeed noisy, but >

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

A few points: - The BGT (Blasted Goldball Terminals) were indeed noisy, but    they did make a better carbon copy than the 327X screens. - I wrote what was the first "teletype support" for SHARP APL,   I think in 1972 or 1973, for our University of Toronto in-house site.   Character mapping,

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

At the IBM Scientific Centre in Peterlee we had 3270-series terminals for APL characters from 1975, I'm pretty sure. But I learned my APL around 1973 on an EBCDIC-only 3277. No, I didn't use that absurd curly bracketed notation – the first mainframe APL I used was APLSV, which had separate

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

3279 had apl characters. graphical and colour. On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 21:27 Don Guinn, wrote: > Other problems. Never heard of a print train with APL characters for high > speed printers. Had to have a special type ball for Selectric typewriters. > It wasn't until the late 1970's that teletype

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Other problems. Never heard of a print train with APL characters for high speed printers. Had to have a special type ball for Selectric typewriters. It wasn't until the late 1970's that teletype matrix terminals started supporting APL characters. Likewise for 3270 monitors.

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

That's because APL required a specific code-page under EBCDIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(codepage) . On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 12:15 AM, Don Guinn wrote: > My green card showed the EBCDIC character set and it did not include APL > characters. > > On Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 8:37 PM Devon

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

NB. This is the ordinal fraction way of solving the Transylvanian problem. NB. (My earlier solution had an error) NB. First the table of explanations.    NB. 0001 Minna is human NB. 0002 Minna is vampire NB. 0010 Minna is sane NB. 0020 Minna is insane NB. 0100 Lucy is human NB. 0200 Lucy is

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Today the APL display is solved. But it wasn't when J first started. Unicode was there but support was a mess. The keyboard is still a mess, Dyalog keyboard works pretty well but conflicts with Windows keys. Looking at all the glyphs in Dyalog is just as difficult to read as the J primitives. On

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Unicode standardizes the APL representation issue, and creates numerous other problems. It also does not solve the font problems, but that is solvable in many environments. But there’s also the keyboard problem, and it’s almost routine that there’s no consistent documented approach there.

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

My green card showed the EBCDIC character set and it did not include APL characters. On Tue, Jun 12, 2018, 8:37 PM Devon McCormick wrote: > I'd like to amend (extend) a previous post: > > To the best of my recollection APL could be written with EBCDIC so why J? > - EBCDIC, to the best of my

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

My full reply is in the thread: [Jchat] J, APL, or calendars? On Thu, May 24, 2018 at 12:48 AM, 'Bo Jacoby' via Chat wrote: > mr Jose Mario Quintana remarks that stopwaches and odometers are 0-origin > devices. Today is the 24th day in the 5th month in the 2018th year. The

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

mr Jose Mario Quintana remarks that stopwaches and odometers are 0-origin devices. Today is the 24th day in the 5th month in the 2018th year. The ordinal numbers begin at "first". But a stopwatch would show that 2017 years, 4 months and 23 days have passed. Cardinal numbers begin at zero. A J

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Forgive me but I find the present situation funny because, taken literally, one should conclude that currently "It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that" cannot be found. On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 6:48 PM, Raul Miller wrote: >

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Indeed: you could create that talk page, if you felt that that was a good thing. Or, I could. Or anyone else who has registered on that site could. Meanwhile, "draft" means "the task description might change if people find significant problems with the current description". That does not seem

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> Introducing zero as an ordinal number is not helpful. > The widespread confusion is demonstrated by the fact > that the millenium was celebrated erroneously by the > end of year1999 rather than correctly by the end of > year 2000. On May 25, 1961, President J. F. Kennedy > announced the goal of

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> Speaking of which, we don't yet have a J entry for > http://rosettacode.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar There is a box on that page stating: French Republican calendar is a draft programming task. It is not yet considered ready to be promoted as a complete task, for reasons that should be

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Introducing zero as an ordinal number is not helpful. The widespread confusion is demonstrated by the fact that the millenium was celebrated erroneously by the end of year1999 rather than correctly by the end of year 2000. On May 25, 1961, President J. F. Kennedy announced the goal of sending

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Well... sure, if you start converting between different calendar systems, you'll have to have a model for each of them (and if you're dealing with more than two of them you'll probably want to designate one of them as the "reference" system along with conversions between each of the others and

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

That is clever! However, if I am interpreting it correctly, the verb - - ~:&* in the context of the hybrid numbering below does not seem to be as general as - is in the context of the astronomical numbering: Historical ... 4 BC 3 BC 2 BC 1 BC AD 1 AD 2 AD 3 ... Hybrid ...

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

That is right, regardless of the unit used, there is a price to pay for missing the unit 0. Thus, it seems to me, illustrating the issue with centuries, as opposed to years, makes my point larger. PS. Some people still like to eradicate 0 when referring to specific years, including the present

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Of course, you could use an expression such as (- - ~:&*) if you like... But, yeah, that convention does seem to be slightly... different from straight - Thanks, -- Raul On Sun, May 20, 2018 at 5:54 PM, Jose Mario Quintana wrote: > Historians refer to specific

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

"Who cares if you are sometimes off by one year because the year 0 is missing?". The time from the beginning of the first century BC to the beginning of the first century AD is one century, while 1-_1=2.  Who cares if you are sometimes off by one century because the century 0 is missing? I do. 

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Historians refer to specific years, using a well-known event as an anchor, naturally as AD 1, AD 2, AD 3, ... and, going backward, as 1 BC, 2 BC, 3 BC, ... Dropping the AD and inserting a - (_ in J) instead of BC allows for a simple general consistent rule for calculating the years elapsed

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Eh... everyone has problems, but it doesn’t make sense to require all words meaning the same thing to be used everywhere— usually just one of them tends to be enough. — Raul On Saturday, May 19, 2018, 'Bo Jacoby' via Chat wrote: > In Roger's link, Dijkstra is referring to

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Ian, good point. I had forgotten about how Iverson's notation was co-opted to make it into a programming language. Skip On Sat, May 19, 2018, 7:05 PM Ian Clark wrote: > Wasn't it rather an example of an inventor fixing problems with other > people's ideas (IBM, IP

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The J language is a good example of an inventor fixing problems with their first inventon, to improve on it. ​Skip​ On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 10:27 PM jane dalley wrote: > This is my first post; my hope is this is an appropriate question. > > My knowledge of APL and J

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The terms "ordinal number" and "cardinal number" has advanced mathematical meanings in the theory of infinite sets and transfinite numbers, but the words also have ancient meanings in grammar. The semantics of a cardinal number is to count the elements of a finite set, and the semantics of an

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

…Well done, Devon. Here's my set of 1-liner-plus-a-comment answers to J7Q. But I guess if I sat down tomorrow I'd come up with a fresh set. *1. How similar are both APL and J?* +/ 1 2 3 , (-4), 5.01 NB. once you get past that: …not very. *2. To the best of my recollection APL could be

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> Dijkstra advocated for 0 origin: EWD831: Why numbering should start at zero > . See also http://jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2018-April/037533.html , referring to a recent paper by Cassini & Conway, where Dijkstra is a reference.

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Dijkstra advocated for 0 origin: EWD831: Why numbering should start at zero . -- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Having programmed on 4K 1401s I became very aware of never wasting storage. So when forced to program in VB I could not decide to allocate arrays one element short or not. Really hated wasting the storage. But what would happen if VB started index range checking? On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 10:54 AM,

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

That would work in basic because index notation is the only way of accessing basic array elements. Of course that would not solve off-by-one errors, but those are always problems. -- Raul On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 12:31 PM, Joey K Tuttle wrote: > I recall being astonished (circa

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I recall being astonished (circa 1974) to learn of the IBM product development group's approach to implementing BASIC regards index origin. They had a similar discussion to the one here, and decided a simple solution would be that when a user declared a (row by col) array, simply set aside

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I was asking because when I tried to research the history of this issue, I found distinctions including: quaternions vs. vectors vectors vs. scalars vector notation vs. index notation roman numerals vs. arabic numerals (also the absence or presence of 0) The distinction between vector

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I prefer index origin zero too. And I mentioned this discussion to my wife this morning she pointed out that 2d and 3d graphs always have an origin of zero. But when I first learned FORTRAN back in the stone age it only had index origin of one. But when it comes down to it. Pick one. I don't care

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I prefer 0=⎕io, especially for array arithmetic, because it works well for mixed-radix indexing, which is essential for array operations. As an implementor of functional array language processors (compilers and interpreters), I do this sort of thing a lot, under the covers. Consider this nice

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The first one I looked at was "Handbook of Mathematical Functions" published in August, 1966. Also looked in several texts from college. I couldn't stand returning them to the bookstore for almost nothing. Then looked up vectors and matrices online. Whenever the index was not significant in the

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Agreed. On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 8:46 AM, Roger Hui wrote: > > The mistake in APL was to duck the issue by allowing both making > generalized indexing difficult. > > That is why I say "⎕io *delenda est*" and not "1-origin *delenda est*", > although I do have a

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

What book, specifically? What year was it first published? Thanks, — Raul On Friday, May 18, 2018, Don Guinn wrote: > ​If you look at the notation for vectors and matrices i​n mathematics the > first element of a vector is written as V(1) and the upper left corner of a >

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> The mistake in APL was to duck the issue by allowing both making generalized indexing difficult. That is why I say "⎕io *delenda est*" and not "1-origin *delenda est*", although I do have a preference. ⎕io *delenda est*! On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 7:40 AM, Don Guinn

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

​If you look at the notation for vectors and matrices i​n mathematics the first element of a vector is written as V(1) and the upper left corner of a matrix is M(1,1). Having to use parens because I can't figure out how to put subscripts in e-mail. True, in summations of infinite series etc. the

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

OK, I'll give the questions a go, too, bearing in mind that I am not a power user, just a J dilettante. How similar? - About as similar as Lua and Javascript :) !!! They may look completely different on the surface and are used differently but the underlying ideas and the paradigm

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I'd actually say that things have moved on a bit, and now with machine learning et al so prominent, the programming paradigm of J/APL may be gaining some traction. Look at how dominant R has become! OK it's no J but there are similar concepts involved that an R programmer would benefit from

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I only just read Ian's challenge after I made my post but - challenge accepted! On Fri, May 18, 2018 at 1:35 AM, Devon McCormick wrote: > How similar are both APL and J? > - Compared to almost every other computer language, they are nearly > identical. > > To the best of my

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

How similar are both APL and J? - Compared to almost every other computer language, they are nearly identical. To the best of my recollection APL could be written with EBCDIC so why J? - EBCDIC, to the best of my recollection, supported extended character sets, sometimes through the use of "code

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Regarding 0-origin and 1-origin indexing. It helped me to mentally distinguish between cardinal numbers, 0 1 2 3 . . . , pronounced "zero", "one", "two", "three", and so on, and ordinal numbers, 1 2 3 4 . . . , pronounced: "first", "second", "third", "fourth", and so on, or alternatively

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> Sorry if any of these questions are perceived to be offensive, probably they have been asked many times before. > > Sorry also if these questions are deemed silly such as a toddler might ask. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings…" [Psalms 8:2] I congratulate Jane in presenting us with the

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Around two millennia ago some people were counting from zero [0, 1]. How do we know? From glyphs carved in stones and painted on 3 (or perhaps 4) books known which did not reach Fahrenheit 451 [2]. Apparently, they did not get confused when one cycle ended and the next one started as opposed to

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I remember the paper well: The Prime Factorization of 1, by Jeffrey Shallit, now professor of mathematics at the University of Waterloo. n = */ q: n, therefore: */ q: 1 1 q: 1 (i.0) -: q: 1 1 On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 1:56 PM, Nollaig MacKenzie < noll...@amhuinnsuidhe.net> wrote: > >

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

On 2018.05.17 13:14:26, you, the extraordinary Roger Hui, spake thus: <...> > > One way to think about index origin, is to consider the question whether 1 > is a prime. http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLDesignExercises1.htm#14 > Aeons ago, in _Quote Quad_, there was

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I don't really want to debate whether 0-origin or 1-origin is better (you can find a record of a previous discussion in Is Index Origin 0 a Hindrance? ), but I do take issue with your statement that mathematics has origin one. Consider the

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

The ⍺ and ⍵ notation was introduced in 1974 http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/DirectDef.htm . Forks were invented by Ken Iverson and Eugene McDonnell on the way back from the APL88 conference in Sydney, Australia http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm#fork0 , first written up in APL89

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Perhaps the mistake was for APL to include an index origin of zero. FORTRAN has index origin one and so does mathematics. The idea of index origin zero came from computer programming as it allows the first element of an array to fall at the address. Software convenience. PLI was interesting in

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

True. I didn't have access to that APL, but read about it. And I didn't grok tacit at the time. I do remember that they used alpha and omega for left and right like x and y in J. At least, that's how I remember it. On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 1:23 PM, Roger Hui wrote: >

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

As I recall Carthage was destroyed. Maybe the scourge of index origin 1 will follow. Cheers Sent from my iPhone > On May 17, 2018, at 1:23 PM, Roger Hui wrote: > > If it used alpha and omega then it's not tacit. Tacit means no explicit > mention of the function

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

If it used alpha and omega then it's not tacit. Tacit means no explicit mention of the function arguments; the term "tacit" was invented in 1991 http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/TacitDefn.htm . Tacit definition was first used APL\360, way back in 1966, as in +/ , but it was not recognized as

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Tacit came out first in APL. Used alpha and omega. First time I saw +/÷# and thought "What is that??" (Sorry. Couldn't find rho.) On Thu, May 17, 2018, 11:24 AM David Lambert wrote: > "APL and J are conceptually similar. That is, one knowing one language can > easily pick

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

"APL and J are conceptually similar. That is, one knowing one language can easily pick up the other. " Verbs and rank thinking are easily transferred. Tacit programming was new and difficult for me, having used APL, APL2, and a VAX-VMS APL from DEC. .QQ is quote quad, .BX is box, etceteras.

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

"Back on my soap box, the in things in computing now are GUI and web. Actual problem solving makes up a very small part of programming now" Do you use JHS? -- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Ha!! Sounds like arthritis: Cartilage must be destroyed. b On 2018-05-17 12:21 PM, Roger Hui wrote: APL supports the Bad Idea of "index origin", whereas J uses index origin 0. The Bad Idea ... I prefer to call this an "infelicity", and sign off my posts with ⎕io *delenda est*. On Thu,

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

> APL supports the Bad Idea of "index origin", whereas J uses index origin 0. The Bad Idea ... I prefer to call this an "infelicity", and sign off my posts with ⎕io *delenda est*. On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 7:54 AM, Robert Bernecky wrote: ​... ​

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

If you are not an APL user, I suggest you download a copy of Dyalog APL from www.dyalog.com, along with RIDE, its IDE. Both are free for personal use. This will let you make immediate comparisons of the utility of both APL vs. J. J was created as an attempt to remove some of the design warts

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

I have a perspective that might help cover topics you raised which haven’t been covered much, yet, in this thread: APL has had a lot of implementations, with literally dozens of different kinds of character set support. J, in contrast, is strictly ACII based (though also capable of representing

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

​Having learned APL in its early days, but never was my main programming language, you may need to take my comments with a grain of salt too. APL and J are conceptually similar. That is, one knowing one language can easily pick up the other. But when J was started Iverson had an opportunity to

Re: [Jchat] How close is J to APL?

Hi Jane, I do not have a great deal of experience with APL, so be sure to take my answers with several grains of salt. For many of your questions, the answers (far better than I could supply) are found in the wiki J4APL http://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Doc/J4APL You may have more questions