Re: Programming language vote - results

[Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org>]

James L. Ryan wrote:

> In article <34565F22.5B66C13E@acm.org>, Robert Bernecky <bernecky@acm.org>
> wrote:



> In the early seventies Burroughs APL had a "keyword" mode which was



> intended to make APL somewhat accessible from an ASCII terminal. When

> keywords were enabled APL letters mapped into ASCII lowercase and APL

The word "somewhat" is indeed true. I may have invented the first
ascii/apltranslator when I wrote Teletype support into SHARP APL in 1971 or 1972.

I included a translation function that took two character matrices [glyphs and
their text representation] and used that to translate text one way to the other.
You reversed translation direction by switching the matrix arguments.
Similar in spirit to Weigang's APLASCII mapping arrays, but more primitive.

> underscored letters mapped into ASCII uppercase. APL's special characters
> were represented by mnemonics embraced by less-than and greater-than
> symbols. Admittedly this was not intended to be a substitute for an APL
> terminal, but was intended to allow "emergency" access to APL from a
> non-APL terminal. With keywords on, and from an ASCII terminal, a line of
> APL might have looked as follows:

ALL of the keyword schemes I saw (ALL of which differed from
vendor to vendor and even within a single vendor's products) had a
number of bad characteristics, such as:
   - incorrect caret placement on error display
   - difficulties with escape characters
   - little (no) attention paid to user-centered design, to
     make the thing inviting to use. As you point out, Jim,
     they were strictly "Emergency use only" interfaces.

> Burroughs also contracted, in the early seventies, with Memorex to build a
> small number of terminals with 188 printing glyphs, 94 for ASCII and 94
> for APL. These terminals could be either hard switched or soft switched

Yes, indeed. The mighty MRX1240, with an 18 inch long ribbon cartridge thatcost a
bundle, inability to see what you were typing or where the cursor was,
and a MTBF of a few hours.

> friends "golf-ball" terminals. Even though Burroughs attempted to sell
> these Memorex dual character set terminals, the market didn't seem
> interested.

Probably the market asked the suckers (like us) who actually bought oneor two of
them first.

> Actually the ability to have computer output with both upper and lower
> case didn't come about until the early sixties. The computers I programmed

Well before the inception of the APL\360 project.

Bob