I'm sure you are right, but I see asians using American keyboards with English alphabets to write Chinese, Japanese, and everything else every day. And with a few keystrokes, they switch between writing in English and writing in (insert asian language). In theory, I don't know why it would be any different to do the same with APL symbols. In practice, I just don't know enough about the problem, so maybe it is.
On Mar 25, 12:15 pm, Ken Wesson <kwess...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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
