[Jprogramming] The Ambiguous Dictionary

[Dan Bron]

Devon wrote:
>  The order of the dictionary makes a lot of intuitive sense the way it is:
>  the pure symbols are at the top, the lettered symbols are at the bottom.  As
>  you go down the first column, the pure symbols start with boolean functions,
>  proceed to simple math, then more complex math and non-math functions
>  affecting shapes, sizes and orderings of arrays; finally, the pure symbol
>  section ends with the more complex function composition operators.

>  Putting it in a more lexicographic order according to "a." would make sense
>  if we thought people would be familiar with the order of punctuation
>  symbols, something that seems very unlikely: off the top of  your head, do
>  you know if comma is before or after semi-colon?

I agree.    Also, since there are only about ~100 entries, and they all fit on one page, ordering of the DoJ isn't as serious a
problem as a real dictionary (because even a linear scan will complete in reasonable time).

>  The useful redundancy might be to offer alternate groupings on other pages,
>  say by categories like "set membership", "complex numbers", etc.

Yep, we could have one "tab" per collation or ordering; the standard one is the default tab, parts-of-speech ordering could be a
tab, group-by-use (sets, arithmetic, etc) could be a third, and we can add more as we come up with them.

-Dan