Re: [Bug-apl] miscellāneum

[Dr . Jürgen Sauermann]

On 03/03/2019 02:49 AM, Hudson Flavio Meneses Lacerda wrote:
...
> Two questions:
>
> 1) Do you know of some NARS2000 ↔ openAPL ↔ GNU APL
> character translator? I only can use GNU APL, because the other ones do
> not use Unicode.
No. GNU APL has an internal translator from the codepage used by IBM
APL2 (which is needed
to understand their ⎕AV in some transfer fformats) but that's it. I
would assume though that
such a translation is not to too difficult to do in APL code.
> 2) What is the usage of 'other' characters currently included in ⎕AV?
> Are they (e.g. @, &, ⇄, µ) reserved for eventual use like '$'?
If I remember correctly (this was more than 10 years ago) then the GNU
APL ⎕AV started with
the IBM APL2 ⎕AV and after that some changes were made as needed. The
⎕AV is a mix of
characters with APL relevance and characters without. Over time some
characters without APL
relevance were kicked out and replaced with character that had APL
relevance but were missing
in the ⎕AV (such as ≢, ⍬ and so on).

Characters without APL relevance are candidates for being removed in the
future. The line
drawing characters will remain because even though they have not APL
relevance they are
used in the output of some command, like ]SVARS.
 ...
>
>> =3= Optimization Questions
>>
>> That is just of curiosity: how do the 10 efficiency suggestions by
>> Bergquist (p.34−37) apply to GNU APL?
>> Could you provide a reference? I never heard of Mr. or Mrs. Bergquist.
>
> BERGQUIST, Gary A.  APL Advanced Techniques and Utilities.
> Vernon/Connecticut: Zark Inc. (1987).  Available at:
>   
> http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/apl/Books/APLADVANCEDTECHNIQUESANDUTILITIES
>   
>
> That book is so interesting that I (wrongly) assumed that it was known
> by every APL programmer! :-)
It says Copyright 1987 which is 10 years after I started with APL. In
1987 I was busy
building a mainframe-sized parallel APL computer with 256 processors and
had little
time to read books (other than Knuth's Trilogy).

But now I have more time and will have a look at it.
>
> (It is in PDF-1.6 format that does not work with some viewers, but
> pdf2ps + ps2pdf may generate a more compatible file.)
>
>
>>
>> =4= Boxing
>>
>> And when it comes to aesthetics, I find the IBM style with → and ↓
>> more APL-like than the NARS style adapted in ]BOXING 21.
> Yes, I have read that IBM APL 2 also shows the difference between
> numbers and strings (as ]boxing 29 does, in another way).
>
>
> Thanks,
> Hudson
>