Re: [Bug-apl] Make infinity and pi symbols into constants?

[Elias Mårtenson]

On 17 January 2014 01:38, Juergen Sauermann <address@hidden> wrote:

 

 well, I see a number of problems.

First thing is ⎕AV. Even though ⎕AV is a bit outdated and ⎕UCS  is a less proprietary
way to generate charactersm it may still be in use. And is often tied to APL fonts in
some way. Usually the lower half are exactly ASCII and the upper half is some mapping
of relevant APL characters.

⎕AV shall be 256 characters in size for backward compatibility. ⎕AV is already rather crowded,
so for every new character (single ones, not entire Unicode pages) we have to kill another one
(convention has it that all relevant APL characters are in ⎕AV). New function symbols are possible
but would undermine compatibility of GNU APL with IBM APL2.

I don't actually know anything about ⎕AV. I only ever used ⎕UCS for conversion between characters and code points.

If we would allow unused greek symbols in user defined functions or variables, then what would

Z←ABCσ123 mean?

To me (and admittedly old-fashioned APL-er) this would look like a monadic function ABC calling σ with argument 123
or maybe dyadic σ with arguments ABC and 123.

I have to admit that it would look like that to me too. :-)

 

2. The symbol table of GNU APL allows for those symbols already. Only the tokenizer
    insists on the standard symbols. So if you desperately  want π for ○1 then you can try this:

No, I'm not that desperate. :-)

What it does mean is that I can remove the √ symbol from the super-shift-r keymapping in Emacs. :-)

Regards,

Elias