'delta slope bar epsilon or'[2]
This could be interpreted to be any of the following:
The APL "slope" character
The APL "slope bar" character
A blank
Compressing the spaces out to try to clarify the situation makes the
line difficult to parse by people (quick now, is the last character
in the string below a "nor" or an "or"?) and it still doesn't handle
the overstruck character problem:
'deltaslopebarepsilonor'[2]
The following may be ugly, but for practical situations it is clearer:
'@H....@E.OR'[2]
The beginning of each APL character is easily discerned, and (best of
all) it should be possible to write a simple C program to read in
strings like this, transform them into correct APL, and write them
out to disk for reading by an APL interpreter.
George Otto
Bell Labs, Indian Hill
rho 'A rho B'
is unambiguously 3, as the spaces surrounding the second "rho" are part
of the symbol. Similarly,
'transpose X'[2]
is 'X' unambiguously.
The main problem with my proposal is that I have yet to figure out a way
of representing both the minus and negative signs that is not ugly.