[Rampoina]

> APLers hate the successors, because "notation is tool for thought" and ASCII is a poor representation.

I'm perplexed by this one. I'll concede that the APL symbols are prettier but why does it magically stop being a notation just because you use combinations of ASCII symbols. Especially when many APL symbols are composed of units themselves.

⍲ vs *: One is 'notation' because it has the two units stacked on top of each other and the other is not because they are stacked horizontally?

[gmfawcett]

At least one person [1] has played with using APL symbols in J, at least at the display level. I gave it a try, but was surprised to find that I preferred the ASCII version. Perhaps if J had its own custom symbol set (extended from APL?) it might have been better -- not all of the APL symbols have exactly the same meaning in J, and I remember finding some of the differences to be a bit jarring. For example, conjunctions like '&>' and '&.>' are heavily used and deserve their own symbols -- just putting a little-circle before a '>' feels like a hack. (No disrespect intended to the author, though, this was a great experiment.)

[1] https://wjmn.github.io/posts/j-can-look-like-apl/

[tzs]

If a symbol is made of multiple side-by-side ASCII characters, are there any problems telling where one symbol ends and the next starts?

In ordinary text, we separate words with spaces, and add punctuation at the end of sentences to further make the structure apparent. (Well, now we do...a lot of pre-modern writing would justwritethewordssmushedtogetherlikethis [1]). In most of the sample programs in APL successors I've seen there usually didn't seem to be space between symbols.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150902-the-mysterious-...

[mcguire]

Yes, at least for me, trying to learn it. For example, / in many examples is an "adverb", modifying the previous operator, although xx/ is frequently introduced as a single thing. (Are all built-in verbs one or two characters?)

[n4r9]

No idea about APL languages but it sounds similar to asking whether the code is uniquely decodable:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-length_code#Uniquel...

[Tomte]

I've wondered that myself, because the zoo of symbols doesn't speak to me, like iota, but maybe the mathematical use has something to do with the APL use.

So I simply assume there is something deeper going on than "it looks ugly". Maybe someone here is in that camp and can tell us. At least the argument was made on HN in some earlier APL or J thread.

[yiyus]

There is something I call "the whiteboard test". I work in research, and I spend a good part of my time working with formulas in whiteboards and discussing about them with my colleagues. I am constantly confronted with the irregularities and limitations of standard mathematical notation and see APL as a huge improvement, I would really like to use it more, and I have even taught some basics to colleagues so we can use +/ for sum and ×/ for prod, or ⌈ and ⌊ for max and min, for example.

Iverson solved some remaining inconsistencies in J, and it includes some elegant concepts as tacit programming (+/ % # for the arithmetic average is beautiful) that were not in the original APL, but I do not see myself writing J in the whiteboard or a notebook.

But ASCII may not be the main problem. Curiously, I find that K performs much better in my whiteboard test than J, perhaps because the set of symbols is much smaller. And if you think it may be a matter of getting used to it, I have worked with APL far less than with J and still find the APL symbols more appealing.

There are many things I like about J, and I do not have a very rational explanation to give you, but I agree with those that say that APL is a better tool of thought.

[OnlyOneCannolo]

Are you really saying that non-ASCII is notation and ASCII is not? When I read your first comment, I understood it to mean that better notation is better than worse notation.