[HN Gopher] APL386 Unicode - An APL Font
___________________________________________________________________
APL386 Unicode - An APL Font
Author : chrispsn
Score : 84 points
Date : 2020-08-18 07:11 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (abrudz.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (abrudz.github.io)
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| I intend to obtain an IBM 2741 terminal and APL typeball before I
| start learning how to write APL--Anyone got any leads, other than
| ebay?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Is "with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif"
| something someone wanted?
| snicker7 wrote:
| Absolutely. See Fantasque for example.
| ColanR wrote:
| The original APL385 font is one of my favorites for coding.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Is it also a fun, whimsical look inspired by Comic Sans?
| ColanR wrote:
| It definitely looks like it could be.
| musicale wrote:
| It reminds me of some old-school typewriter and printer fonts,
| and indeed it's a lot like Consolas.
|
| I like it, though some of the spacing is odd (might be able to
| fix it even if it is a monospaced font.)
| fwip wrote:
| When I'm in the right mood, I use Comic Code[1] for my
| terminal, along with a different palette than my normal
| "working" environment. Even if it's just placebo, it helps me
| shake up my thinking a bit.
|
| [1] https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/tabular-type-foundry/comic-
| cod...
| gnulinux wrote:
| I sorta dig it, looks fun and artistic. I don't know what's
| wrong with "W" though. Not sure if my browser is rendering is
| bad or there is a bug, because it doesn't look like rest of the
| ligatures, it looks nothing like "M".
|
| EDIT: In case people are wondering this is what I see:
| https://imgur.com/a/P3npCYW
|
| As you see W looks "bolder" (?) than others.
| [deleted]
| beervirus wrote:
| Would look right at home on a 1990 Mac.
| xashor wrote:
| Still hoping for someone to design a font for J with ligatures so
| it can match APL's beauty for reading without making it more
| difficult to type, i.e. automatically rendering /: as [?], |: as
| [?], |. as [?], etc.
| specialist wrote:
| Agree this is a good idea.
|
| To clarify: it'd be cool if language's supported multiple
| lexemes (?) for a single token. So -> and - (U-2192) are
| equivalent.
| moonchild wrote:
| Ligatures are an abomination. But a unicode j that uses those
| symbols natively would be cool; it's not the 90s anymore.
| zerocrates wrote:
| Keyboards are awfully similar to how they were in the 90s, is
| I think the salient point. Representing the symbols in the
| source isn't now an issue really, but typing them still would
| be.
| kps wrote:
| I don't know J, but an APL keyboard layout is not a problem
| for any major current OS, nor is a layout with ISO Layer 3
| (Mac Option, Windows AltGraph) mnemonically allocated to
| useful symbols.
| snicker7 wrote:
| I think it comes down to accessibility. Requiring users
| to memorize a second keyboard layout is very demanding.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Though modern "emoji pickers" have extended the range of
| IME and soft keyboard tools that regular users use (often
| daily). I've been joking that the next APL is probably
| made from emoji, but it's not entirely a joke: the
| Windows emoji keyboard (Win+. or Win+;) has a pretty full
| Unicode math symbol section (click the Omega top-level
| tab and then flip through the bottom level tabs), and
| while it is missing some of the nice search features of
| the more colorful emoji, gives relatively quick access to
| a lot of options.
| moonchild wrote:
| Is it more demanding than asking them to memorize a
| collection of (mostly arbitrary) ascii symbols and
| digraphs? If you learn apl, you have to remember that
| grade up is [?] (s-S-4); if you learn j, you have to
| remember that grade up is /:. The primary barrier to
| entry is remembering what operations you can do and how
| you can do them, not how to type them.
| moonchild wrote:
| Typing symbols is not really an issue. First off, you can
| configure your text editing environment to automatically
| replace digraphs with their associated symbols (e.g. when
| you type i. replace it with [?] automatically). But second
| of all, memorizing an alternate keyboard layout isn't that
| big of a deal. Is it really harder to remember that grade
| up is super+shift+4 ([?]) than that it's slash+shift+;
| (/:)?
|
| I would argue that difficulty in _reading_ code and knowing
| what symbols represent what operations is a much more
| pertinent consideration. And though neither is especially
| mnemonic (can you really have a mnemonic for something as
| abstract as 'sort'?), it's much clearer that single-
| character grade down ([?]) is the reverse of single-
| character grade up ([?]), than for digraphs (/: and \:).
| (It's also easier to parse symbols when they're only one
| character.) Not least because unqualified / and \ represent
| very different operations--the first is reduce, and the
| second is either scan or prefix--as do /. and \\.; so
| there's no precedent for it.
|
| And so, assuming you accept the obvious superiority of
| graphical/unicode representation of symbols, the digraph
| method for typing them becomes superfluous. You now have to
| associate the mental concept of grade with two completely
| separate representations: the graphical representation of
| the completed character ([?]) and the ascii representation
| which you type (/:). You can't escape the latter, because
| every time you type a grade, you'll see the '/' on screen
| for a moment before you type the ':' and the character gets
| digraphed.
|
| I mentioned in the beginning that you can configure your
| editor (and repl) to automatically replace digraphs with
| their associated symbols (so /: automatically gets replaced
| with [?]). On face, this seems functionally equivalent to
| the ligature suggestion, but it's not. Mainly, it affords
| flexibility. If you want to type digraphs in your
| environment, you _can_ , all my criticisms aside. But I can
| configure my environment to use an alternate keyboard
| layout, avoid complicating my editor environment by
| introducing ligatures, and we can work together
| _seamlessly_. Doing it that way also adds flexibility to
| the language; if [?] is the single canonical representation
| of 'grade up', and / and : are separate symbols with their
| own unique semantics, then they can be freely juxtaposed.
| It'd also be somewhat of a pointless indirection, to have
| ascii digraphs underlying what are essentially unicode-
| pictorial representations.
|
| (Note: I said only 'digraphs', for clarity, but everything
| I said applies also to trigraphs, of which j has a couple.)
| brudgers wrote:
| Unicomp sells APL keycaps...and the good type of 90's
| keyboards.
|
| https://www.pckeyboard.com/page/product/USAPLSET
| Camillo wrote:
| I don't know if it's intentional, but the clumsy character
| shapes, the haphazard line weights and the "bleeding ink" effect
| whenever there is a curve or a corner give it a strong "early
| DTP" aura. Or possibly even earlier, like a mimeographed pamphlet
| in the late 1960s, when APL was new.
| anonymfus wrote:
| Kerning on Cyrillic is pretty much awful with this font. Ever on
| the example string it looks like there is a space between ' and
| E, and Sh and Shch are almost glued together.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| Isn't this a monospaced font?
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| It's interesting to me to see these projects as alt-history, and
| see them as the dead-end technical choice that they were.
|
| Has any programming language since then tried to use more than
| ASCII for its keywords?
| ColanR wrote:
| Mathematica does this, and they solve the keyboard problem with
| floating palettes of symbols.
| jonjacky wrote:
| The Z ("zed") notation -- but that is a non-executable
| specification language:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_notation
| gnulinux wrote:
| I program in Agda pretty often and community usually uses
| Unicode characters for most things, so I do too.
|
| The impl of AVL trees in stdlib: https://github.com/agda/agda-
| stdlib/blob/master/src/Data/Tre...
|
| Some basic properties of natural numbers:
| https://github.com/agda/agda-stdlib/blob/master/src/Data/Nat...
|
| It makes the code look absolutely gorgeous, readable and it's
| very easy to type too. I use Emacs agda-mode so it just
| automatically replaces e.g. \r with - or \== with [?] etc...
|
| I don't use Agda for theorem proving, I make real life programs
| in Agda, I compile them to Haskell and compile with GHC to
| executables.
| fwip wrote:
| That's pretty cool. What kind of problems do you find
| yourself solving with your Agda code? (Or, asked another way,
| what sort of stuff do your programs do?)
| ColanR wrote:
| What font do you use for this? It looks weird with my
| defaults.
|
| I once seriously considered trying to build something that
| included math symbols in the syntax. It's pretty cool to see
| that I don't have to.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Julia also allows Unicode characters, which I think is great
| for math-heavy programs. I love that about it. I always
| forget the keybindings for them though.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Obviously it belies a very anglo-centric view of the computer
| engineering landscape, but frankly I think that's a good thing,
| as it allows easier exchange.
| brudgers wrote:
| Racket uses l for "lambda" and it's pretty common in Racket
| code.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-08-18 23:00 UTC)