[Jprogramming] J Symbols

[William Tanksley, Jr]

Tracy Harms <kaleidic at gmail.com> wrote:
> Making the dots bigger might help a lot. Here's an idea that might be
> relatively simple: have a J tokenizer active during typing, and every
> inflected graphic primary gets changed so that the dots are both enlarged
> and overlaid on the graphic. By "overlaid" I mean the result is a single
> character with an appearance of the graphic and its (enlarged) inflections
> squished together.

This is what I was referring to by mentioning Unicode overstrike; some
fonts actually include many of the graphemes we'd need (and perhaps
ALL of them), written in a way that hundreds of years of experience
proves is human-readable, and when J or your editor emits the base
character, the overstrike character, and then the inflection
character, the Unicode renderer that's part of your OS will
automatically pick the human-designed font character that deliberately
combines the two.

If we can find the right font, then, the coding task should be very
simple, at least for 90% of the problem (which is fine for a
proof-of-concept).

Oh, I see that someone asked whether I meant that people should have
to type an overstrike character (like in APL). Oops, no. I meant that
people would only type normal J, and the editor would automatically
render the result.

Again, this would probably be nothing more than a proof-of-concept.
I'm sure we'd find that some J tokens would wind up being best
represented by glyphs other than the simple overstrike, and some won't
have a Unicode representation (and so we'd HAVE to think of another
solution).

Fun!

-Wm