RE: APL Under-bar Characters

Ken Whistler <kenwhistler at att dot net> wrote:

>> A more
>> robust approach for their purposes might be to teach ρ to exclude
>> combining characters (gc=Mn) when counting the "size" of a string.
>
> And it seems to me that that is *very* unlikely to happen, precisely
> because ρ is so deeply embedded in the array and vector logic of APL.
>
> That is counting the data size of arrays of "characters" (i.e., code
> units). If somebody tried to somehow teach ρ to do something different
> about characters, changing the concept of array of code units into
> something more akin to what we think of as Unicode strings, that
> would end up being a *different* language -- not APL!

Then we're back to the central point that Alex Weiner originally
expressed, in arguing for the encoding of precomposed letters with
underbar:

> The string length functionality would view an 'A' code point combined
> with an '_' code point as an item that has two elements, while
> something that looks like 'A' Should be atomic, and return a length
> of one.

--
Doug Ewell | http://ewellic.org | Thornton, CO 🇺🇸