[elviejo]

That is why Iverson invented APL. As a notation to get rid of all those inconsistencies in math notation. And for years he taught math classes with APL on the blackboard without computers.

whether he succeeded, is debatable. But APL is definitely powerful, succinct and "regular".

In APL you don't infer the operation from the types at all. × is elementwise, +.× is inner product /always/, on scalars, vectors, matrices, whatever. The glyph tells you what happens. Nothing is bold, nothing is inferred, nothing depends on what your professor assumed you'd absorbed.

I've been trying to get into Iversonian languages myself with the book: Calculous on J

[anthk]

For something like APL modulo the Unicode symbols:

https://t3x.org/klong/

[slartibardfast0]

hi, would you mind linking to the book?

https://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/23.htm is the closest i've found, but wondering if i'm missing something perhaps, Julia?

tyvm

[mkl]

Probably this: Kenneth E. Iverson - Calculus https://www.jsoftware.com/books/pdf/calculus.pdf

[slartibardfast0]

makes sense! thanks very much

[Ar-Curunir]

I mean, unfortunately being completely explicit and pedantic does not scale.

Imagine that instead of being able to use high-level programming languages, you had to write in assembly everywhere, all the time.

That's what software engineers and computer scientists' suggestions of redoing mathematical notation fee like to mathematicians.

These efforts also don't go anywhere because research mathematics moves beyond elementary arithmetic very quickly, and once you're there, "descriptive" notation becomes as incomprehensible as whatever mathematicians use.