Re: OT: Beauty of programming languages

[Andrew Bernard]

Very amusing!

But what about B, C, D, E, F, G, K (an APL derivative), L (several), R, S, T (a Scheme dialect) to name a few?

Seriously now, APL had special keyboards with the symbols which were wondrous to behold. And indeed, J was constructed in recognition of the divine impracticality of it:

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_%28programming_language%29

To avoid repeating the APL special-character problem, J requires only the basic ASCII character set, resorting to the use of the dot and colon as "inflections"[7] to form short words similar to digraphs. Most such "primary" (or "primitive") J words serve as mathematical symbols, with the dot or colon extending the meaning of the basic characters available. Additionally, many characters which might need to be balanced in other languages (such as [] {} "" `` or <>) are treated by J as stand-alone words or, when inflected, as single-character roots of multi-character words.

But in fact, we used to use APL with plain ASCII keyboards – worked just fine. And to be somewhat less Off Topic, the purpose of our using APL was for early research and development in computer music and synthesis software at The University of Melbourne here in Australia. APL class languages are particularly nicely suited to algorithmic music composition work.

Andrew

On 25/08/2015 14:28, "David Kastrup" <address@hidden on behalf of address@hidden> wrote:

It is fitting that the language name is now a single character.  I am

just surprised that it is one in the ASCII character set.