Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!amdahl!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!Schizoid From: Schizoid@cup.portal.com (FRED APPLE BONHOTAL) Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl Subject: Re: Is APL a dying language? Message-ID: <12034@cup.portal.com> Date: 2 Dec 88 23:14:45 GMT References: <13635@cisunx.UUCP> <1938@water.waterloo.edu> <723@convex.UUCP> <18@kepler1.UUCP> <2044@vu-vlsi.Villanova.EDU> Organization: The Portal System (TM) Lines: 23 >APL would go farther with ASCII characterset.... I've used at least two implementations that worked with a 64-character set (uppercase ASCII, basically); in fact, that's where I learned APL. It wasn't until much later that I ever used the "native" APL characterset. In one implementation, each character that wasn't represented on a "normal" keyboard was mapped to two characters, the first of which was always $ or @ (at the time, the "native" set didn't include $); e.g. rho was $R. Not all of the definitions were intuitively obvious -- theta was $V, phi was @V, del was $F, locked-del was $K -- but it wasn't that hard to learn. It wasn't even that difficult to read. (University of Maryland) Easier to learn, but harder to read, was the Harris implementation. With the exception of diamond (@DI), each character was represented by an @ followed by the first letter of the character's name followed by the first constant after that (del was @DL, rho @RH); where there were multiple common names, the dyadic one was given preference. (There was one other exception, now that I think about it: delta was @DE.) It's surprisingly useful; I wish more APL's offered this escape set. schizoid@cup.portal.com