Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Avshalom 3254 days ago
Yeah, the APLer in me is strongly pro unicode, it's not like it would even be that hard for an editor to find di/tri/quadgraphs and replace it with a unicode glyph for when you just don't want to remember what incantation causes your keyboard to produce ⌹ (I'd go |:| for the trigraph).
1 comments
pdkl95 3254 days ago
> APL ... ⌹

I really wanted to learn APL after seeing Conway's Life implemented[1] as one expression with no loops or temporary variables (using ⌹). Then I realized I would never remember how to type all of the {di,tri}graphs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

link
Avshalom 3254 days ago
it's... easier than you might think? about half of them are relatively mnemonic and most of the others are close to a mnemonic (∩ is on 'c' but ∪ is on 'v'). If your on linux you can say set the windows key to shift over to an APL key binding (it's always present in KDE, in gnome enter gsettings set org.gnome.libgnomekbd.desktop load-extra-items true at a terminal then it will show up in the input menu)

and both Dyalog (free now for non-commercial use) and GNU APL (via Emacs) have secondary input methods until you get comfortable.

link