2022-04-12 15:32:37 Well, I'm trying to get an APL environment going on my notebook. I've installed both GNU APL and a free version of a commercial setup called Dyalog. Installation was straightforward and both seem to run just fine. I can get in and out of them. 2022-04-12 15:33:36 But I don't feel anywhere close to getting the keyboard and font support for all those special characters in place. I did GNU APL first, and fussed for a while over the kbd/font issues. I was *hoping* that a commercial product might just "take care of all that" on install, but that didn't happen with Dyalog. 2022-04-12 15:35:26 I downloaded a font from Dyalog and put it in my true type font folder, so that may be handled, but I've had no visual evidence of it yet. 2022-04-12 15:36:09 Dyalog invited emails on the topic, though, because "Linux handling of keyboards is in a state of flux." I sent a query - we'll see how good of a company they are. 2022-04-12 16:28:45 KipIngram, did you make it very far with the online interpreter? 2022-04-12 16:34:00 I played with it some. Not sure I found the right one, but I found one. Ran it through some of the early examples in the Iverson paper. 2022-04-12 16:37:01 I certainly can't say "I've got this," but the paper really did get into enough depth that I think there's some serious power under that hood. 2022-04-12 16:37:43 I susupect it will take me quite a bit of practice to get "fluid" with it. 2022-04-12 16:47:27 GNU APL is quite behind; it focuses on full APL2 compatability 2022-04-12 16:48:54 One thing that immediately is "not quite Forthable" is how a lot of operators come before their arguments in APL. I haven't learned enough to see if I think that can be fixed. 2022-04-12 16:49:27 Certainly the way APL does arrays - where you just type them as a string of numbers - doesn't really fit; Forth couldn't distinguish between that and independent integers. 2022-04-12 16:50:03 But I've talked about an Octave like environment, and for that I had in mind something like 2022-04-12 16:50:27 [ 1 2 3 ] [ 4 5 6 ] dot . 32 ok 2022-04-12 16:51:27 And if I mess with the APL enough I'll probably start LIKING the symbols - particularly if I get skilled at typing them. 2022-04-12 16:52:23 I'm betting the APL keyboard support delivers those as Unicode characters, though. 2022-04-12 16:53:12 Because there was specific talk about how once you had that keyboard support working it would work in other applications and you'd "be able to type in most European languages." 2022-04-12 22:45:18 Well, crap. A few weeks ago I gave some thought to UTF-8 and decided I had no interest - had no need. 2022-04-12 22:45:37 But if I really want to inherit any of the APL ideas into my system, I'll want to use the same symbols. 2022-04-12 22:45:51 Even if I "RPN-ize" them somehow (and I don't know yet if that's feasible). 2022-04-12 22:46:05 They're UTF-8 characters. 2022-04-12 22:46:28 I could try to cheat and use a different encoding for them, but in the grand scheme I think that would be begging for aggravations. 2022-04-12 22:47:42 EXPECT picks them up just fine - KEY is the issue. 2022-04-12 22:48:02 Well, it picks them up fine too, so long as they come properly. 2022-04-12 22:48:08 EXPECT calls KEY. 2022-04-12 22:49:02 But somehow I'd have to watch out for trying to act on a piece of one - at some level I'd need to recognize that I just got the first byte of a UTF-8 sequence and be smart enough to make sure I waited for the other bytes. 2022-04-12 22:49:25 And KEY seems like the right place to insert that - it would just buffer the "remaining" bytes and hand those over before it did any further syscalls. 2022-04-12 23:39:05 No, that wasn't the explanatin either. I don't yet k now why WORD wasn't picking up that character as a word.