Talk:Array notation design considerations

Although I agreed with Marshall that the current implementation(s) should be separated from the history the division should be entirely transposed. The concepts may have been driven largely by Phil Last and secondarily by Adám Brudzewsky both of whom are mostly associated with Dyalog but the history proper ranges well beyond the confines of a few Dyalog conferences and the offices at Bramley.

The current page should be entitled "Array Notation" and what is now "Array notation in Dyalog APL" shoud be "Array Notation - implementations" with Dyalog being one section within it. --Phil Last (talk) 08:50, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

I'll add what I know about the history to the main page. I wasn't aware of the APL# design, so thanks for pointing that out. Most of what you've written doesn't seem appropriate for a wiki, and I'd recommend instead publishing it somewhere else under your name and citing it here. If the conversations with John Scholes are private emails, they're not verifiable by a reader unless sourced this way. And as a reader I'm not interested in things like internal issue numbers and half-formed unpublished ideas like :Array. There's a reason Wikipedia says things like "If you have a personal connection to a topic or person, you are advised to refrain from editing those articles directly". We're not so strict about this, but my judgment here (as someone who also has a personal connection!) is that it's interfering with the information density that most readers would want. --Marshall (talk) 12:50, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

Having read the relevant parts of the APL# language description I disagree with the description you've given. A namespace is a list of expressions, not name-value pairs: for example [[ a←b←⍳10 ⋄ {a[⍵]←0}¨2 4 6 ]] would be allowed. Having not worked with :namespace I may be missing some details, but it seems [[ and ]] function identically to :Namespace and :EndNamespace and those aren't considered array notation. It's still relevant to the history but the framing as a kind of array notation seems misleading to me. Similarly, I took out the section on NARS: there's no discussion of the display as a way to write arrays in the manual, and multi-line printout with parentheses appears to be purely for display. So Adám's claim that "the need for a way to represent complex structures was already recognised" is speculative unless there's a source I haven't seen. --Marshall (talk) 14:41, 19 August 2022 (UTC)