[[Okay, we need a reference here as well - J is, in my understanding, a current version of APL like programming language - right?]] I have only used APL but I understand J is a newer version that removes the need for the APL font which was always a bane of any installation. Yet, it seems strange for this to happen in the days of Unicode and graphics displays. I don't think it makes it any easier to read though. See http://www.acm.org/sigapl/apl.htm ''Could someone give me an example of how you'd configure a unicode environment to get apl characters on your keyboard and have them display properly? I expect that you could do it under emacs, but is that the only possibility?'' [RS] rolled his own at [An APL playstation] - need one Unicoded APL font, and [Tk] of course... [[There are many versions of J, the early versions are freely distributable in source, http://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~ljdickey/#apl-j is a good resource. More recent versions are freely available only in binary form under a non-commercial license, http://www.jsoftware.com is the resource here. One thing which distinguishes J from other languages in the APL family is that Ken Iverson -- the guy who invented APL (to make it possible to document the IBM 360 architecture, back in the early 1960s) -- is also the architect behind J.]] [[Also of possible interest is a writeup on '''A''' [http://www.vector.org.uk/aflat/history.htm] -- the implementation of A was important in getting J off the ground. Unfortunately, that page is a bit hard to read, because it expects that you have a special font installed with implied special character mappings -- they should have used gif images to represent those characters. Also, it's a bit old -- while that page claims that A+ "is is quite definitely not for sale", A+ is now distributed under the terms of the GPL .]] ---- [[Refer to [JTcl].]] ---- [Category Language]