Syntax in K

About syntax in K:

from K mailing list, Re: syntax -- modest proposal for a K-Speed-Reader, by Dick Dunbar:

[..] 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 psychological 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 more 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. [..]

From Kuro5hin, Syntactic compression and lexical density., by Steven Apter.


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