Re: [Bug-apl] About fractional notation

[Juergen Sauermann]

Hi Elias,

that would break cut-and-paste from APL output back into APL. And the subtle difference
between / and  ⁄ could be difficult to notice for vision-impaired people like myself. Not to talk
about small fonts with only a few pixels.

I would also suggest that people do not use ⎕PS←1 N for normal program output, but only for
debugging purposes. In my opinion the real value of fractions (if any) is the improved precision
of internal computations and not in how the output looks like. And depending on some devices
displaying  ⁄ might not be a good practice either. For example, my email client (Thunderbird)
displays ⁄ as 2 characters.

Finally, there is a note regarding the equality of N and ⍎⍕N in the ISO standard (page 236,
chapter 15.4.1 Monadic Format) which could not be satisfied with ⁄ .

/// Jürgen

On 08/16/2017 06:39 PM, Elias Mårtenson wrote:

Currently, the division symbol is used to represent fractional numbers. I would like to suggest the use of FRACTION SLASH (U+2044) instead. I think that would look better, and more intuitive. 

Note that this symbol is different from a regular slash, /, in several ways. First and foremost, it has a different angle (usually closer to 45°). Secondly, its purpose is to render fractions, and some fonts take advantage of this and will render the numbers around the symbol differently (offset to to bottom left and top right respectively). Here's an example, and I'm not doing any tricks at all with the text, all I do it's to put the fraction slash in there instead of the division sign: 1⁄3456.

At least in Gmail on my phone thus renders beautifully. And even if the font doesn't have direct support for fractional rendering, it will still look nice. 

Regards, 

Elias