On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 12:36 AM, ultranewb <pineapple.l...@yahoo.com> wrote: > On Mar 25, 8:58 am, Sean Corfield <seancorfi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> My final year project at university was to write an APL interpreter >> (in Pascal, back in '83). APL is a fun language. I haven't looked at J >> (yet). > > Awesome! > > J is APL, but totally "modernized." Everything you would expect in a > functional language (currying, first class functions, anonymous > functions, composition, etc) and even more things, like hooks, trains, > forks, not needing to refer to variables explicitly, etc. Sort of > scary, when you think of what you could do with ancient APL. > > One other difference with APL is that they removed the old complaint > of "special characters and keyboards" by changing it to pure standard > ascii characters. Thing is, I don't particularly like this aspect. I > much prefer old APL symbols to the new string of plain ascii > characters which I find ugly. The irony in all of this is that > Iverson was before his time in creating a language with special > symbols - some people didn't "get it," you needed special equipment > and character sets and fonts, etc. So they removed this old complaint > with J... just with the advent of unicode, which actually allows for > such things quite easily.
Er ... not exactly. It may allow representing the special characters in disk files and network traffic in a manner that will survive being passed through tool chains and among web users, but I'm aware of no magic Unicode floppy disc I can stick into my machine, run "make install" (or "setup.exe") off, and wind up able to *type* the special characters by simply looking down at my keyboard, finding one of them, and pushing it. :) So it'd mean a lot of annoying alt+numpad foolery, copy-paste, or memorizing arcane emacs-style chords. Maybe in another ten years keyboards will have become multitouch screens that can serve various other purposes, and when used as keyboards can have the glyphs changed in software; then maybe you can just task switch to your J IDE and watch your keyboard F-key and numpad symbols change as determined by the keymaps defined for the application with the input focus, or something; and this won't all cost a ridiculous amount of money. But that day has not yet arrived. And besides, a touch-screen keyboard can't be typed on by feel, unless they add software-controlled shape shifting or something. I think there are experimental display devices for the blind that could be put under a flexible oled touchscreen to make a fully programmable keyboard that actually had keys you could feel and push down, but that's even longer to make practical and inexpensive. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
