diff options
Diffstat (limited to 'docs/commentary/history.html')
| -rw-r--r-- | docs/commentary/history.html | 2 |
1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/docs/commentary/history.html b/docs/commentary/history.html index cb296237..d1063fdd 100644 --- a/docs/commentary/history.html +++ b/docs/commentary/history.html @@ -211,7 +211,7 @@ <p>APL <a href="https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Array_notation">array notation</a> has been developed mainly by Phil Last and later Adám Brudzewsky. The big difference from array literals in other languages is the idea that newline should be a separator equivalent to <code><span class='Separator'>⋄</span></code>, as it is in ordinary APL execution including dfns. The changes I made for BQN, other than the ligature <code><span class='Ligature'>‿</span></code> discussed below, were to use dedicated bracket pairs <code><span class='Bracket'>⟨⟩</span></code> and <code><span class='Value'>[]</span></code>, and to allow <code><span class='Separator'>,</span></code> as a separator.</p> <p>I picked out the ligature character <code><span class='Ligature'>‿</span></code> between YAG meetings, but I think Richard Park was most responsible for the idea of a "shortcut" list notation.</p> <h4 id="double-struck-special-names"><a class="header" href="#double-struck-special-names">Double-struck special names</a></h4> -<p>There was a lot of discussion about names for arguments at YAG (no one liked alpha and omega); I think Nathan Rogers suggested using Unicode's mathematical variants of latin letters and I picked out the double-struck ones. My impression is that we were approaching a general concensus that "w" and "x" were the best of several bad choices of argument letters, but that I was the first to commit to them.</p> +<p>There was a lot of discussion about names for arguments at YAG (no one liked alpha and omega); I think Nathan Rogers suggested using Unicode's mathematical variants of latin letters and I picked out the double-struck ones. My impression is that we were approaching a general consensus that "w" and "x" were the best of several bad choices of argument letters, but that I was the first to commit to them.</p> <h4 id="assert-primitive"><a class="header" href="#assert-primitive">Assert primitive</a></h4> <p>Nathan Rogers suggested that assertion should be made a primitive to elevate it to a basic part of the language. I used J's <code><span class='Value'>assert</span></code> often enough for this idea to make sense immediately, but I think it was new to me. He suggested the dagger character; I changed this to the somewhat similar-looking <code><span class='Function'>!</span></code>. The error-trapping modifier <code><span class='Modifier2'>⎊</span></code> is identical to J's <code><span class='Head'>::</span></code>, but J only has the function <code><span class='Value'>[</span><span class='Head'>:</span></code> to unconditionally throw an error, with no way to set a message.</p> <h4 id="context-free-grammar"><a class="header" href="#context-free-grammar">Context-free grammar</a></h4> |