Aihuxi.125 net.lang.apl utzoo!decvax!harpo!ihnss!ihuxi!otto Thu Apr 8 22:07:11 1982 More on ASCII APL Simply using lower case names for APL characters does not neatly handle the problem of discussing APL strings in ASCII. Normally, to be readable, such lower case names must be prefixed and suffixed with blanks, but this can be incorrect in many cases. For example, what is the meaning of the following simple string (origin 1)? 'delta slope bar epsilon or'[2] This could be interpreted to be any of the following: The APL "slope" character The APL "slope bar" character A blank Compressing the spaces out to try to clarify the situation makes the line difficult to parse by people (quick now, is the last character in the string below a "nor" or an "or"?) and it still doesn't handle the overstruck character problem: 'deltaslopebarepsilonor'[2] The following may be ugly, but for practical situations it is clearer: '@H.CB@E.OR'[2] The beginning of each APL character is easily discerned, and (best of all) it should be possible to write a simple C program to read in strings like this, transform them into correct APL, and write them out to disk for reading by an APL interpreter. George Otto Bell Labs, Indian Hill ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.