APL Under-bar Characters

[Ken Whistler]

On 8/18/2015 9:23 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Tom Gewecke <tom at bluesky dot org> wrote:
>
>> I guess the question is whether having a named sequence would somehow
>> make it easier for the gnu apl folks to add something to their system
>> so that their string length function sees such a sequence as having a
>> length of "1"?
> I don't see why that would, or should, be the determining factor. A more
> robust approach for their purposes might be to teach ρ to exclude
> combining characters (gc=Mn) when counting the "size" of a string.
>
>

And it seems to me that that is *very* unlikely to happen, precisely
because ρ is so deeply embedded in the array and vector logic of APL.

That is counting the data size of arrays of "characters" (i.e., code units).
If somebody tried to somehow teach ρ to do something different
about characters, changing the concept of array of code units into
something more akin to what we think of as Unicode strings, that
would end up being a *different* language -- not APL!

--Ken