Hi,
I dare to disagree. In my opinion the ∇ editor is very useful in APL
scripts (not used as
interactive editor, but to define functions used later on in the
script). Functions specified with
∇ are IMHO much more readable than functions specified with ⎕FX, in
particular when they are long.
My Emacs mode already uses the external function editor. You access it
using C-c C-f. What I did was also to detect when ∇ is typed, and intercept
that command to also open up the function editor that way. Thus, right now,
there are two ways to open the function editor in Emacs.
The reason I did t
Function definition mode (typing ∇ followed by a symbol name) is an
artifact of the kind of terminal hardware supported by APL (the IBM
2741 with its iconic typeballs) in the 1960s. As such, nearly 50
years later, it may be worth rethinking some of these things to take
advantage of newer editor a
Right now, the Emacs mode preprocesses all input being typed by the user,
and if he types ∇ followed by a symbol name, the external function editor
is opened and the command is never actually sent to the interpreter. This
works fairly well, but there are some annoyances:
- Emacs doesn't know if
