About *(syntax) in _(K):

from K mailing list, _("Re: syntax -- modest proposal for a K-Speed-Reader"
 | http://www.kx.com/listbox/kdb/msg00791.html), by Dick Dunbar:

<BLOCKQUOTE>
[..] I remember the attempts in _(APL) to "gentrify" the language to
make it more accessible to people who were symbol-adverse.
Even the small translators that replaced the _(APL) symbols that
were missing on ascii keyboards with @xx equivalents produced
totally unreadable code.

There is a good <STRONG>psychological</STRONG> reason for this that I learned
when studying graphical presentations.  The more data you put
into a single page, the easier people interpreted it.  The
techniques we were exploring was to discover how we could put
even <STRONG>more</STRONG> information on a single page.

Humans have built-in pattern recognition capabilities at birth
that operate well all of our lives.  Short-term and long-term memory
must be learned and it is fragile ... we don't remember very well.

Once you become familiar with the _(K) idiom patterns, you can
read code more quickly because we employ pattern recognition
rather than memory to read the code;  the patterns are evident
on a single page, and you must use memory if the code exceeds
your visual range. [..]
</BLOCKQUOTE>

From _("Kuro5hin" | http://www.kuro5hin.org/),
_("Syntactic compression and lexical density."
 | http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2002/11/14/22741/791/127), by _(Steven Apter).
