Hacker News

points by veqq 3 days ago | hide | 0 comments

You can just change keyboard settings in any OS? The same way you change from QWERTY to DVORAK you can change to Cyrillic or... But every APL programmer just uses something like deadkeys, typing e.g. ` before another key like `[ becomes ← or `$ becomes ⍋. The same are largely used for BQN too. Every tutorial teaches how to type explicitly e.g. https://tryapl.org/

If you insist on looking at your keyboard, you can also buy stickers for like $10.

Yeah, I changed the keyboard settings in my OS (Win at the time) a few times, but it was a pain to have to remember the key layouts even with tutorials. I like the idea of using stickers at a lower price which is more reasonable. I always wondered why PC engineers did not design Chameleon keyboards with keys that can change their key-designation (LED key shape) based on OS usage per region. I'm sure it's partly due to money. I mean who would not like to have a keyboard that lights up different keys depending on the language you use. There just needs to be a universal key design agreed upon that can accommodate this type of keyboard design.

Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of a compact language and may reconsider APL in the future if, my financial luck changes :)

There are derivatives of APL, e.g. J, which replace the symbols with ASCII characters, to avoid the keyboard problem:

https://www.jsoftware.com/#/README

I actually prefer a hybrid solution, i.e. using a part of the original APL symbols, which are now provided by Unicode, so you can map them on any standard keyboard as you please, while other symbols are replaced by keywords.

The reason is that a part of the original APL symbols make sense and are useful, because they are extensions of the traditional mathematical notation, while some other symbols, e.g. those used for trigonometric functions, are arbitrary and had only the purpose to make the text somewhat shorter and simplify the parsing of the language at a very early time, when the available resources were very scarce, and this does not matter today any more.

That gives me the idea of making a sort of transpiler for it as a side project. Maybe I will.

Thank you for the link :)