From: Lee Dickey Datum: 1999 12 30 Re: APL Character Repertoire Dear friends of APL, I have sent off a paper copy of the APL Character Repertoire to the Secretariat of SC22 today. SC22 is the committee on programming languages, to which the APL Working Group reports. This has been a long time coming. It represents the collective efforts of many of you and others, especially those who attended a certain Chinese dinner years ago in London, graciously sponsored by Cocking and Drewry, as I recall. Also, a splendid job has been done by Leigh Clayton, who prepared the big table. The intent of this international standard is to present a table that identifies every known APL symbol from every known APL and locates these symbols within the Universal Character Set (IS 10646) also known as "Unicode". The major portion of this work is already done, but we have recently learned that some of it has been undone by the character set committee. More details will surface on this point. How can this table be of use? All known APL Characters are supposed to be contained in this list, which is a subset of the Universal Character Set. I think it is fair to say that this will assure the future availability of APL fonts on a screen near you. Second, it provides, once and for all, an International Standard which can be used as a "Universal Atomic Vector", to which any APL may refer when documenting any form of data which contains APL symbols. One obvious use of this is for the automatic interchange of APL functions and APL workspaces. There is a workspace interchange convention called WSIS0 this requires that the sending system include a copy of its atomic vector. An interchange convention built on this standard would no longer requires that step. I will be happy to supply either a paper copy or a pointer to a web-site or both. I will be able to do this shortly after the 5th of January. Sincerely yours, Lee Dickey -- Prof. Leroy J. Dickey, Faculty of Mathematics, U of Waterloo, Canada N2L 3G1 1-519-888-4567, ext 5559