Aihuxi.125
net.lang.apl
utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnss!ihuxi!otto
Thu Apr 8 22:07:11 1982
More on ASCII APL
Simply using lower case names for APL characters does not neatly handle
the problem of discussing APL strings in ASCII. Normally, to be
readable, such lower case names must be prefixed and suffixed with
blanks, but this can be incorrect in many cases. For example, what is
the meaning of the following simple string (origin 1)?
'delta slope bar epsilon or'[2]
This could be interpreted to be any of the following:
The APL "slope" character
The APL "slope bar" character
A blank
Compressing the spaces out to try to clarify the situation makes the
line difficult to parse by people (quick now, is the last character
in the string below a "nor" or an "or"?) and it still doesn't handle
the overstruck character problem:
'deltaslopebarepsilonor'[2]
The following may be ugly, but for practical situations it is clearer:
'@
[email protected]'[2]
The beginning of each APL character is easily discerned, and (best of
all) it should be possible to write a simple C program to read in
strings like this, transform them into correct APL, and write them
out to disk for reading by an APL interpreter.
George Otto
Bell Labs, Indian Hill
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