| jsavard@ecn.ab.ca 2006-08-01, 3:56 am |
| Looking for more information on dialects of APL, I have searched
certain parts of Al Kossow's site more closely.
Thus it was I found that a manual on the TOPS-10 version of APLSF is in
the sixth folder of twenty containing a set of manuals for TOPS-10.
(No, I didn't look at the previous five; there was a text file giving
the contents.)
When I first heard of J, I was surprised at Kenneth E. Iverson's
audacity in using % for the division operator, so as to save / for the
APL character having the same appearance, since ASCII, unlike the
standard (963 typeball) 2741 character set, has \ available.
My take was that it was clever - but re-using existing characters in
new ways is, for many, even *worse* than using a new character set, and
so I felt the chances of J taking the world by storm were even less
than those of APL doing so, unfortunately.
But I now see that DEC's transliteration for APL was very similar to
the style of notation used for the language J.
John Savard
|