From e9fd7e6f6bc6d67fe16ea49b738481e0d4c61fac Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Paul A. Patience" Date: Fri, 13 May 2022 22:06:04 -0400 Subject: Fix typos and an awkward formulation --- docs/commentary/history.html | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) (limited to 'docs/commentary') 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 @@

APL array notation 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 ⋄, as it is in ordinary APL execution including dfns. The changes I made for BQN, other than the ligature ‿ discussed below, were to use dedicated bracket pairs ⟨⟩ and [], and to allow , as a separator.

I picked out the ligature character ‿ between YAG meetings, but I think Richard Park was most responsible for the idea of a "shortcut" list notation.

Double-struck special names

-

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.

+

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.

Assert primitive

Nathan Rogers suggested that assertion should be made a primitive to elevate it to a basic part of the language. I used J's assert 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 !. The error-trapping modifier ⎊ is identical to J's ::, but J only has the function [: to unconditionally throw an error, with no way to set a message.

Context-free grammar

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