Arabbit.428 net.lang.apl utzoo!decvax!harpo!npois!alice!rabbit!ark Fri Apr 9 09:00:19 1982 Re: More on ASCII APL I do not see that the problem mentioned by ihuxi!otto is a serious one, except for a special case that I will mention. First, each APL character is a single entity, even if it is formed on a conventional terminal by overstriking two characters. This is especially obvious to those who have used APL 3270 terminals -- they have an extra case shift that causes the "overstruck" characters to appear with single keystrokes. Second, when you reperesent APL characters as lowercase words, you need a rule to decide when a space adjacent to such a character is part of the character and when it is a real space. It doesn't matter what the exact details of the rule are, just that there be a rule and that it be simple enough to know completely. One such rule might be that a keyword is always preceded and followed by a "free" blank, unless the preceding character is a left delimiter or the following character is a right delimiter. A left delimiter is a quote, left bracket, or whatever, and similarly for a right delimiter. Again, the content of the list is not as important as its existence. Given this: rho 'A rho B' is unambiguously 3, as the spaces surrounding the second "rho" are part of the symbol. Similarly, 'transpose X'[2] is 'X' unambiguously. The main problem with my proposal is that I have yet to figure out a way of representing both the minus and negative signs that is not ugly. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.