Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!nott!uotcsi2!news
From: cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca (Christopher Browne)
Subject: Re: ascii version of apl
Message-ID: <1993Apr30.005519.23329@csi.uottawa.ca>
Sender: news@csi.uottawa.ca
Nntp-Posting-Host: prgf
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, University of Ottawa
References: <m47q3B1w165w@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca>
Date: Fri, 30 Apr 93 00:55:19 GMT

In article <m47q3B1w165w@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca> ab@ersys.edmonton.ab.ca (Allan Brockman) writes:
> Worning this message writen by a dyslixc...
No problem.

> Long agow i wanted to do some number crunching but my dyslexia 
> made using text based languages difficult.  Friends sugested APL
> i owe then much thanks APL is perfect for my needs.  Over the past 7 
>years i have looked at a number of different languages and still beleave 
> APL to compair verry favorbly, not just becouse of the lack of spelling 
>problem in APL but becous of its ease of use and power.

I'm glad to hear it.

> It is true that the symble set of APL is dificult to send over the net
> This is not a failing if APL but of the net.  

Actually, I'd place the blame a little more precisely; it's a failing
of ASCII, and the fact that most computer hardware is designed with
ASCII in mind.

Using tools like uuencode, possibly in conjunction with archivers that
handle varying and potentially ugly file formats, there's no problem
with sending general data out over the net.  The problem that there is
with APL code is that people want to combine text with "glyphs," as it
were.

The only way that life would be "better" on the net would be if it had
been designed by APLers, and was intrinsically "APL friendly."  Since
APL is a minority language, that is a little much to expect.

>Never the less the 
>dificulty in sharing APL knoledge in ascii is something we should 
> work-on.  we need an ascii version of APL.  Maney plans have been put 
>foward all whith some marit, but i would like to know why i have not seen 
>someone sugest using j as a ascii representation of APL?

The problem is that while there are a fair number of operators that
are common to APL (and the various variants) and J, there's some
fairly major philosophical differences.

J seems to be more functional (not "it works" functional, but
rather "used to compose functions" functional) than traditional APL.
The rather more formalized grammar structure may fight against
"direct" or "automated" translation.

To put it another way, colloquial APL code seems to look fairly
different from colloquial J code.  I don't think it's just coincidence
- I think it's got to do with some of the deeper structures of the
languages.

I wouldn't mind seeing some "translator" ala j2apl or apl2j; my
suspicion is that in order to make code translatable, it will neither
be good APL code or good J code, because it will have to take the
"lowest common denominator" features common to both.

-- 
Christopher Browne                |     PGP 2.0 key available
cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca           |======================================
University of Ottawa              | Genius may have its limitations, but
Master of System Science Program  | stupidity is not thus handicapped.
