Glyph: Difference between revisions

Display problems have been mostly eliminated by the broad uptake of Unicode. However some difficulties with [[typing glyphs]] remain. Several APL-family languages such as [[J]], [[K]], and [[ELI]] have chosen to stick with ASCII, either by reducing and compacting functionality to use one character per glyph or by using multiple characters. Historically there have also been various encodings of APL in smaller character sets, typically as an alternate way of writing code for an APL with traditional glyphs.

J and K use both ASCII symbols on their own, and followed by one or more periods and/or colons. J terminology calls these ''bigraphs'' and ''trigraphs''. For example, J uses <source lang=j inline>^</source> for [[Power]], <source lang=j inline>^.</source> for [[Logarithm]], and <source lang=j inline>^:</source> for the [[Power operator]], while K uses <source lang=k inline>':</source> for the equivalent of [[Windowed_Reduce#Notable_uses|pair-wise reduction]] (<source lang=apl inline>¯2f/</source>) and <source lang=k inline>0:</source> for line-by-line file read/write. Lately, J has gone beyond this and added <source lang=j inline>{{</source>…<source lang=j inline>}}</source> for explicit functions, similar to the syntax of [[dfns]].