Re: [Bug-apl] miscellāneum

[Hudson Flavio Meneses Lacerda]

Hi Jürgen,

On Sat, 2 Mar 2019 17:01:55 +0100
Dr. Jürgen Sauermann <address@hidden> wrote:
[...]
> There exist 2 left-overs from ancient APL 1 times:
> 
> a)  ⍴⎕AV = 256, and
> b) every defined APL function contains only characters in ⎕AV (which
> is the essence of ⎕AV).
> 
> The backgound of a) is that a character fits into a byte and this
> property is used by several transfer formats for APL data workspaces.
> In the old days there was no ⎕UCS and many APL programs used ⎕AV to
> programatically generate APL characters ro to write APL characters to
> bytes.

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.

2) What is the usage of 'other' characters currently included in ⎕AV?
Are they (e.g. @, &, ⇄, µ) reserved for eventual use like '$'?


> The )OFF proposal sounds reasonable, I will look into it.

Thanks!

(That is sort of the opposite of --persist in GNU Octave.)


> 
> Regarding an alternative preferences file, please note that a single
> preferences file can contain several profiles (selectable via command
> line option -p). Since this file is usually short, I find it more
> convenient to have one file with several profiles than several files,
> In particular when most options are the same in all files and only a
> few differ.


Ah, thanks! I did not know about the profiles!


> =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 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