[Richard Suchenwirth] 2001-01-17 - When [playing APL] in Tcl, I wanted to display the ''real'' APL symbols (which are sometimes very special). Hunting the web for transliterations between APL and ASCII, I soon found Jim Weigang's APLASCII [http://www.chilton.com/~jimw/a2apapr1.html] which looked good to me: he represents any NON-ASCII characters with braced strings. Here's my initial and incomplete converter - it will grow over time, but if you desperately need it, just grab it now ;-) If called with no arguments ''aplish'' performs a little self-test.

A free TrueType font, "SImPL", with APL and many alphabet signs, can be downloaded at [http://www.vector.org.uk/v161/phil161.htm].

 proc aplish {{s {}}} {
    if {$s==""} {
	set s "L{<-}(L{iota}':'){drop}L{<-},L @ x{epsilon}y{and}z>0"
    }
    regsub -all {\{\{} $s \x81 s ;# protect double braces
    regsub -all {\}\}} $s \x82 s
    foreach {a u} {
	<-    \u2190
	->    \u2192
	<=    \u2264
	>=    \u2265
	/=    \u2260
	and   \u22C0
	delta \u0394
	drop  \u2193
	epsilon \u220a
	iota \u03b9
	max  \u2308
	min  \u230A
	neg  \u203e
	or   \u22C1
	rho  \u03C1
	rotate \u233d
	take \u2191
    } {
	regsub -all "\\{$a\\}" $s $u s
    }
    regsub -all @ $s \u235d  s
    regsub -all {\x81} $s \{ s
    regsub -all {\x82} $s \} s
    set s
 }

See [The Lish family] for more natural language converters, and [An APL playstation] where APLish is used.

[AMG] I put an extra set of braces around the argument list.  "proc {s {}} {...}" means two arguments named s and {}, the second of which is considered illegal due to being an empty string.  (Why?)  But we want instead for the empty string to be s's default value.  For this usage proc should get an argument list with one element which is itself a list of two elements, s and {}.
[RS]: Oops, yes.. thanks! I've had that before: first I developed code, tested it, wikified it; then I later thought of another feature, tested it locally, and if satisfied, manually edited it into the Wiki page - ''and did not test again what I've done there''. Sorry!
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[Arts and crafts of Tcl-Tk programming]
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