Text encoding Babel. Was Re: George Keremedjiev

[Paul Koning]

> On Nov 27, 2018, at 9:23 PM, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
>>> I have long wondered if there are computer languages that aren't rooted
>>> in English / ASCII.  I feel like it's rather pompous to assume that all
>>> programming languages are rooted in English / ASCII.  I would hope that
>>> there are programming languages that are more specific to the region of
>>> the world they were developed in.  As such, I would expect that they
>>> would be stored in something other than ASCII.
> 
> On Tue, 27 Nov 2018, William Donzelli via cctalk wrote:
>> APL.
> 
> APL requires adding additional characters.  That was a major obstacle to acceptance, both in terms of keyboard and type ball (my use preceded CRT), but also asking the user/programmer to learn new characters.  I loved APL!

I learned it about 15 years ago (OpenAPL, running on a Solaris workstation with a modified Xterm that handled the APL characters).  Nice.  It made a handy tool for some cryptanalysis programs I needed to write.

I wonder if current APL implementations use the Unicode characters for APL, that would make things easy.

> I love the use of an arrow for assignment.  ...

One of the strangest programming languages I've used is POP-2, which we used in an AI course (Expert Systems) at the University of Illinois, in 1976.  Taught by a visiting prof from the University of Edinborough, I think Donald Mickie but I may have the name confused.

Like APL, POP-2 had the same associativity for all operators.  Unlike APL, the designers decided that the majority should win so assignment would be left-associative like everything else -- rather than APL's rule that all the other operators are right-associative like assignment.  So you'd end up with statements like:

	n + 1 -> n

More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POP-2

	paul