Jot-Dot-Floor

The Education Vector Vol.11 No.3

Jot-Dot-Floor by lan Clark

Here s a quote from the June 1994 editorial:

my first innovation, a columnof jottings on rock-bottom educational matters. Sinceit s simply got to have a techie APLtitle, what better than Jot-Dot- Floor ?

I didn t really want an answer to this. But I got one. A week or so ago the following flame from cyberspace tracked me down, node-by-node,like King Tut s ghost:

This has been bugging mefor a while, so I thought I dbetterfix it now. Your columntitle jot dot floor is catchy, but wrong, Por someone doing education stuff you're misleading the public. Floor is a monadic verb. Min is a dyadic verb. Both inner and outer products take dyadic verbsas their right operands. Hence your column should properly be titled: jot dot min This is not only correct, but looksnicer[3 characters of 3 each].

jot dot min Bob (Bernecky)

Well, what can I say? Bob s right, of course. I could point to the absence of arguments altogether, which makes it niladic, sort of, but that only draws attention to its being syntactically as well as semantically wrong, besides making people wonderif there are any valid arguments in the bodyofthe text, let alone thetitle.

I could hide behind a symbolic rendering: ¢ . | but that s obscurantist and just bemuses the public. The Editor-In-Chief was no comfort. He said 1 should have consulted the ISO standard which gives the proper English namesfor all the primitives (now hetells me!).

But I was thinking of a plan to digitise myself enunciating the names of the primitives in my beautiful BBC English (mummyused to leave me alonein the house with the radio on). My son s already doneit in broad Werdle. I could find others to read them for me in Brummie, Merkin, perhaps even Strine. Then onto French, and otherlanguages.

I thought some more about it. Do the Finns have standardised namesfor the APL verbs and can you type them on single line? Do the Russian namesfor the

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The Education Vector Vol.11 No.3

verbs have perfective and imperfective aspects? Bearing in mind who hosted APL'94, do the Belgians and do they have twice as many standard names as everybody else oneset in Walloon and one in Flemish?

Whoelse can I think of? What's Spanish for Floor, or Min?Is it the same in South America? Do Californian schools have to teach three namesfor every APL verb, in English, Spanish and Vietnameselike their public signs? Have the French expelled the last remaining soupcon of Franglais from their APL nomenclature?Is APL usage governed by the Académie Francaise? What about APL in Hebrew do the verbs decline and the nouns conjugate? Hasthe Islamic world even begun to think of namesfor the contents of 14V? or weretheir scholars calligraphing them from right to left in flowing Naskh during the 11th century? Did the Crusadersactually bring APL back from the Holy Land,only to have it branded as heretical by the official dogma? Dothe Chinese use the same written namesas the Japanese, but pronounce them differently? Do the Eskimos have 127 different names for Rho? And what, oh what, are they doing to APL on the Pacific Rim? Do the Ozzies care an *x*x?

Let s come nearer home. Do the APL primitives have names in Welsh, and why not, man? Would the acceptance of Gaelic names by the wholeIrish people help or hinder the peace process? North of the Border, would the SNP demand different names on the PC and the Macintosh?If Cornish is an extinct language, would Cornish-spoken APL bring it to life again, or might the other thing happen?

1 began to fantasise about touring the world on an APL scholarship, armed with a tape recorder and a copy of I-APL, discovering how different primitive tribes pronounced the APL primitives and release myfindings into the public domain just in time for APL 2000. Thetalking part s very easy on the Mac(I vealready got one that speaks numbers) and Windowssays Me-Too nowadays if you install a Sound-Blaster but you ve spotted the snag, of course. It would need a built-in syntax analyser just to determine whether ? is Roll or Deal, or just a plain query inside a message string. It might be one of those recursively- unsolvable problems when taken across the whole ensemble of possible APL interpreters, In Dyalog APL you candefine a new functionlike this:

MYFUN+=. 1

- so what's the machine to say whenit reaches the end of the expression and finds no right argument?

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The Education Vector Vol.11 No.3

Other mathematico-philosophical movements have foundered on_ their nomenclature, especially when you supply not just one, but two or more new names for things your audience already has namesfor, like good old question- mark. I spent half the seventies trying to get peopleto call their files relations and their records tuples . Not singlets, doublets and triples, mind, but 1-tuples, 2-tuples, 3-tuples, 4...

Needless to say, our band of high fliers ran into a Jot of flak, even from academics, whoreally ought to have known better. Isn t the whole of academic life all aboutlearning to call everything by its right name (Augustine of Hippo,I believe)? The Company cherished us, like the Mikado, as a source of innocent merriment, but I chucked it in and spent the rest of the seventies researching why people found computersso difficult.

Eh, what's that? Did ] discover the reason? Well... no, not entirely. But there are things you can do to be helpful, and things which hinder. Introducing a lot of new names and new concepts with no apparent one-to-one mapping between them is not oneof the helpful things to do. Yes, read my lips. What I m sayingis that the strange characters of APL aren t the problem with the language that s if you accept there is a problem. It s the names for them. Who complains about code-page 437, | ask you? Yet everyone usesit, everyonestill using DOS thatis, andit s full of the most bizarre glyphs Wingdings comes nowhere by comparison. And theyall have names, every last jot andsigil of them.

So J think I ll stick with the presenttitle for now,until I can thinkof a better one. Or a Spanish one, perhaps? Or in one of those Tintin-esque East European languages. It would be fun to see the actual names of the primitives decorated with slashes and backslashes, jots and dots, tildes and carets,all liberally laced with each-pepper.

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