Re: APL mode

[Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 10:33 PM, David De La Harpe Golden
<david@harpegolden.net> wrote:
> On 12/10/13 05:48, Rustom Mody wrote:
>> Is anyone working on this??

> No Free APL for ages than 3 come along at once, etc. (well, A+ has
> been free for a fairly long time))

Another: see https://github.com/dlaurie/lua-apl
So 4 (at least)

>
> FWIW, for completeness, I can think of some other related work: A+ (another
> APL derived language, also GPL*) has long bundled an XEmacs mode for A+ in
> its source tarball.  However, you may well be better off going your own way,
> IIRC it doesn't really adhere to emacsy conventions
> and I don't think it was GNU Emacs compatible anyway.
>
> http://www.aplusdev.org/APlusRefV2_52.html#HEADING605

Years ago I got APlus working with Xemacs (its clearly stated: not
compatible with gnu-emacs)
Then it stopped working (with xemacs that is -- some X issues?) and so
I hacked up something to make it work with gnu-emacs.
My work-in-progress page: http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AplInDebian

FWIW recently Xemacs is getting so bitrotten that debian has
unfortunately removed it:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=670292
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=725883

This does not mean it is unavailable or uninstallable but just much harder.
Multiply that by
- APlus is also getting obsolescent
- most people (in 2013) know little/nothing about APL
and clearly the barriers to entry (on the APlus-avenue) are only increasing.

Note for a super-ace programmer (which means not me!) all these
different APLs could be supported under one umbrella in (gnu)emacs.
This entails:
1. Completing a unicode-based set of modes for Apl and inferior Apl
2. Making an latin-ish encoding for APlus
3. Having some configuation flags so that the base unicode encoding
can be converted if necessary on file-saving/process-sending
[My WIP http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AplInDebian basically tries to
do this but without making a new latin-ish encoding -- needless to say
it works sometimes and fails many times :-) ]

So... APL seems to be making a mini resurgence.
Anyone wanting to give a helping hand in putting emacs into the
picture will be gratefully accepted :-)

Rusi
-- 
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