The Last Great Empty-Array Joke

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 158

In some ways, Vector assembly just got a great deal easier. With the new release of Dyalog APL come a set of ‘standard’ font layouts and mappings which should result in some consistency across submissions from Dyalog users in different countries. The good news is that virtually all the APL and national language symbols have the same mappings as are used in the APLPLUS font from APL2000; the bad news is that the zilde and squad characters are different! The odd thing is that Manugistics chose to upset the Icelanders — by overwriting the thorn and eth symbols — while Dyalog chose to upset the French by using the left and right guillemot. Given the relative market for their products in these two countries, I find this a little strange!

The obvious solution, adopted by Vector from this edition forward, is to upset both the Icelanders and the French by duplicating zilde and squad in my APL2741 layout, so that I can accept material in either font and the APL characters will print correctly. What is more, when pasted from our Web site into the correct interpreter they will execute correctly. If you paste anything with a zilde into the wrong interpreter, you will get some rather puzzling syntax errors. Squad is not yet a problem.

The moral of the story is: submit APL material to Vector in either APLPLUS or Dyalog International format and I can cope. I know IBM have high hopes for Unicode for their Windows product, but in the short term it would be wonderful if they too adopted one or the other of the accepted mappings for their Windows 95 release. The font (and Duncan’s excellent sans serif screen font to match) are free to anyone who can make use of them.