ISO-IEC / JTC 1 /SC 22  N  ????

Date:    1999-12-28

ISO - IEC / JTC 1 /SC 22 / WG 3

Secretariat :    

Contents

1 Scope 1

2 Conformance 1

3 Normative reference(s) 1

4 Terms and definitions 2

5 Symbols (and abbreviated terms) 3

6 Clause 3

6.1 Subclause (level 1) 3

6.1.1 Subclause (level 2) 3

6.1.2 Subclause (level 2) 4

6.2 Subclause (level 1) 4

Annex A (normative)

Bibliography 11

Foreword

ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) and IEC (the International Electrotechnical Commission) form the specialized system for worldwide standardization. National bodies that are members of ISO or IEC participate in the development of International Standards through technical committees established by the respective organization to deal with particular fields of technical activity. ISO and IEC technical committees collaborate in fields of mutual interest. Other international organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in liaison with ISO and IEC, also take part in the work.

International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 3.

In the field of information technology, ISO and IEC have established a joint technical committee, ISO/IEC JTC 1. Draft International Standards adopted by the joint technical committee are circulated to national bodies for voting. Publication as an International Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the national bodies casting a vote.

This standard was prepared by ISO-IEC / JTC1 / SC22 / WG3, the working group for the Programming Language APL.

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Introduction

APL is a programming language that has used special characters to represent various functions.. The Universal Character Set includes all the special characters that are known to be used in every APL. The repertoire given here is a list of all those APL characters together with an identification of where they are positioned in the Universal Character Set.

The use of IS 10646 has gives APL the opportunity to specify the locations of these characters, primarily for the purposes of workspace interchange. This standard is intended to assist users of APL in moving APL characters from one workspace to another or from one APL implementation of APL to another, in a way that is consistent with ISO 10646.

Programming Language APL -- Part 2:
APL Character Repertoire

1   Scope

This International Standard is intended to assist in the communication of APL characters between APL applications.

Any application conforming to this standard shall use the table presented in this standard.

2   Conformance

3   Normative references

This document refers to

• ISO 8485 Standard for Programming Language APL
• ISO 13751 Standard for Programming Language Extended APL
• ISO 10646 Universal Character Set

4   Terms and definitions

Definitions:

character

Any character listed in IS 10646.
 

APL character

Any character listed in the table of Annex A.
 

5   Symbols (and abbreviated terms)

None

6   Clause

6.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

Annex A (normative)

APL Character Repertoire

A.1    The Table of APL Characters

APL Language Character Set

1. This table designates a correspondance between all non-alphabetic symbols used by the APL Language and the character standard IS 10646 (UCS-2), otherwise known as Unicode.
2. The Programming Language APL uses two types of symbols: alphabetic and non-alphabetic (APL character). Any implementation of APL must support both a set of non-alphabetic characters (to be designated in the APL language standard) and a set of alphabetics for identifier designation.
3. The alphabetics may be any set of alphabetics, although the usual set has been the twenty six English Roman characters in two cases; traditionally these cases have been represented as Italic-uppercase and Italic-uppercase-underbarred. Since the alphabetics are not specified as part of the standard, they will not be discussed further here.
4. The APL standard designates a set of functional symbols, digits, and punctuation marks which is sufficient for the language facilities that it defines. Existing implementations, however, use many symbols not used by the standard. When the IS 10646 standard was being prepared, the APL standards group compiled as complete a list of these symbols as possible; this document is one of the final results of that effort.
5. Due to the change of direction which resulted in the merge of the draft 10646 document with Unicode, many of the APL symbols were removed from what became Unicode 1.1 because they were considered to be duplicates of other symbols. This has resulted in a character standard which does not always provide a clear designation for a particular APL glyph; indeed in a few cases there is no really good choice.
6. Nevertheless, it is very important that all APL implementations use the same UCS-2 codepoints for their APL symbols, at least for any communication of data.
7. This document designates a UCS-2 / Unicode codepoint for every known non-alphabetic APL glyph. Any APL implementation which converts APL programs or character data to a UCS-2 or Unicode representation should use this mapping.

The pages of the table:

Notes

Note 1

There has been considerable confusion (at least in the APL community) about the names for the "tack" symbols. The names used here are consistent with themselves and with the technical symbols in Row 22 of the character standard. In some versions the names for some APL glyphs are reversed: this confusion will be remedied in a future version of the character standards.
 

Note 2

This symbol is one for which a truly good choice does not exist; the symbol chosen seems to match what is used in most systems better than any available alternative.
 

Note 3

There are quite a few empty squares in the standard; unfortunately none of them match the traditional APL Quad very well. Since most characters composed with Quad (such as ~) appear as APL symbols in the standard, a strict rendering from the standard document will produce somewhat unsatisfactory output. The square chosen was thought likely to cause the least problems, although admittedly it is not as much wider than the Squish Quad symbol as might be desirable.

Bibliography