Re: A missing feature of APL expressed in the Wikipedia

> APL never officially allowed to index by anything else than integers. One
> cannot for instance write  :
>
> CAPITAL[?'FRANCE']??'PARIS'
>
> or, to stay in the more general vectorial case,
>
> CAPITAL['FRANCE' 'ESPAGNE' 'ITALIE']?'PARIS' 'MADRID' 'ROME'

I agree: it would be nice to have it. If I remember correctly symbols in J
and K give you exactly that, though with a slightly different syntax. Also,
as it was pointed out before, Dyalog APL namespaces give you something very
similar, at the price of a small performance hit. You can write now in
Dyalog APL:
CAPITAL<-#NS ''
CAPITAL.(FRANCE ESPAGNE ITALIE)<-'Paris' 'Madrid' 'Rome'
Since FRANCE and ESPAGNE are variable names, things get a bit ugly when you
need to generate the list of states under program controls, since it
involves formats and executes, but it is doable.
--
WildHeart'2k4

Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote:
 

Hello, Stefano. May I suggest that you switch from you current
*Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180* to something like, for
instance *Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.7.3)
Gecko/20040910* (The Mozilla 1.7.2 works well too; both are free).

Providing you have unicode fonts in your machine, the display of APL
characters works beautifully with those up-to-date browsers, which can
simplify communications in the APL community, including cut-and-paste of
APL expressions directly to and from the newsgroups.

http://www.mozilla.org/products/mozilla1.x/

I think I remember more or less an earlier discussion about non-integer
indexing in APL in this forum. Somebody at the time suggested me to
write a little more about it, but I was in shortage of available time
then. Things are going a little better on that matter now and I can
write the thing if anybody is interested. Cheers.

FDA

P.S. Did anybody try APL fonts in OpenOffice yet ?

FDA <armingaud@noos.fr> wrote in
news:415a6fda$0$16699$79c14f64@nan-newsreader-04.noos.net:

> Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote:
> 
> Hello, Stefano. May I suggest that you switch from you current
> *Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.2180* to something like, for
> instance *Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr-FR; rv:1.7.3)
> Gecko/20040910* (The Mozilla 1.7.2 works well too; both are free).
>
> Providing you have unicode fonts in your machine, the display of APL
> characters works beautifully with those up-to-date browsers, which can
> simplify communications in the APL community, including cut-and-paste
> of
[... deleted ...]
> P.S. Did anybody try APL fonts in OpenOffice yet ?
>
Although your suggested change of software is reasonable, it may not
solve the problem(s).

Sending/receiving APL works quite well for me in email using Mozilla
Thunderbird (there are a few characters which fail to disply) and I
think it's easy to set up some other mail software as well - I think
Outlook Express is one of the "awkward" cases.  Indeed it's so easy I
wonder why people are persisting with transliterations in email.

But - as I understand it (possibly wrongly) - Usenet is really
text/ASCII and not only can we not rely on anything else it may be
unwise to even try.  As I say, I may be wrong here - it hasn't helped
that client software too often handles both mail and news (I prefer to
use different software for each - it keeps my head straight).

What does "try APL fonts in OpenOffice" mean?  I use them whenever I
need to put APL into an OpenOffice document (usually by cut/paste from a
Dyalog session).  Maybe I'm missing something again - fonts "just work".

Dick Bowman a écrit :

> But - as I understand it (possibly wrongly) - Usenet is really
> text/ASCII and not only can we not rely on anything else it may be
> unwise to even try.

Today, 2004-10-09 at 2:09 pm, I would agree, like everybody. However we
live in a world of change, and what is true today will in many cases be
false tomorrow, especially with the collapse of storage and trasmission
costs we encounter these days. The standard that emerges seems to be
clarly Unicode, and we are more liable to see Usenet evolve than Unicode
disappear, I think.

> What does "try APL fonts in OpenOffice" mean?  I use them whenever I
> need to put APL into an OpenOffice document (usually by cut/paste from a
> Dyalog session).  Maybe I'm missing something again - fonts "just work".

Well, I asked the question because I had never tried. But I am glad to
know it works, and shall use it therefore in the future :o)

Dick Bowman a écrit :

> But - as I understand it (possibly wrongly) - Usenet is really
> text/ASCII and not only can we not rely on anything else it may be
> unwise to even try.

Today, 2004-10-09 at 2:09 pm, I would agree, like everybody. However we
live in a world of change, and what is true today will in many cases be
false tomorrow, especially with the collapse of storage and trasmission
costs we encounter these days. The standard that emerges seems to be
clarly Unicode, and we are more liable to see Usenet evolve than Unicode
disappear, I think.

> What does "try APL fonts in OpenOffice" mean?  I use them whenever I
> need to put APL into an OpenOffice document (usually by cut/paste from a
> Dyalog session).  Maybe I'm missing something again - fonts "just work".

Well, I asked the question because I had never tried. But I am glad to
know it works, and shall use it therefore in the future :o)