Integrating ordinary type and many languages with the APL alphabet and keyboard

  • Authors:

  • Paul Berry

  • Affiliations:

  • I.P. Sharp Associates, 220 California Avenue, Palo Alto, CA

  • Venue:
  • APL '85 Proceedings of the international conference on APL: APL and the future
  • Year:
  • 1985

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Abstract

To enjoy the advantages of APL, for too many years the APL user has had to forego “ordinary” characters and keyboards. This has been a major inconvenience to English-speaking North Americans, who have had to adjust to an unconventional keyboard and a character set without lower case, and even worse for Europeans, who found their national keyboards ignored and their national characters unrecognized.With improvements in technology, a change of orientation is possible. Where formerly APL was conceived as a closed system, independent of everybody else's typography, now it is possible to integrate APL with each nation's standard keyboard. This paper proposes a return to conventional lowercase and caps for APL alphabetics, keyboards that offer APL characters without disturbing conventional layouts, and a major expansion of the APL character set to embrace the characters of a world-wide set of languages.