[ On Monday, November 19, 2001 at 23:37:32 (+0100), Andreas Raab wrote: ]
> Subject: RE: f-script
>
> Too bad they couldn't get away from APL like unreadable operators. That's
> the most disturbing part - there's nothing wrong with a few carefully chosen
> keywords (like #join, #reduce etc) and learning all these operators is just
> a pain.

Magic (i.e. special non-alphanumeric) characters as "operators" have
their advantages.

In Smalltalk syntax one of the problems with symbols like you suggest,
or any new keywords that look like words, is that they're much more
easily confused with message selectors or variable names, etc.

One of the advantages of APL, when done right, is that the notation
actually looks meaningful to an experienced person (though not to me,
mind you! :-).  To try to reduce that quite elegant notation to
something that can be displayed on an ASCII screen utterly ruins it (or
at least that's what my APL-programming friends say, and one of them
once worked directly with Iverson).

I'm not sure I'm imaginative enough (or experienced enough in the
problem domain in question) to come up with anything even half as
elegant as what they have implemented in F-Script.

Perhaps a better choice than '@' would be an entirely new glyph, though
at least there's precedence for using '@' (i.e. in ObjectOriented APL).
This shouldn't be a difficult problem for Squeak, though even Squeak
tries to make it easy to transliterate Smalltalk code to ASCII, and
since Squeak doesn't use '@', it seems like as good a choice for these
new "operators" as any other special character would be.

I suspect anyone who works long enough with F-script will learn the new
operators much as an experienced C programmer learns the unique idioms
of C, or indeed even as a Smalltalk programmer learns its idioms.

> Ah, yes. u@(v"(1+lv,_)). Of course ;-)

I wonder what that'd do in TECO!  ;-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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