News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Full Metal Jacket: A Visual Programming Language Based on... by SixSigma on Saturday July 16, 2016 @12:41PM (#12106921)
APL is text based. You can't represent some older programs even with Unicode.

Most of the characters are now in Unicode but some have been deprecated in modern implementations because of the missing representations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APL_(codepage)

Re:Full Metal Jacket: A Visual Programming Language Based on... by qwertyuiop924 on Saturday July 16, 2016 @12:48PM (#12106948)
APL isn't recognizably text. Not ASCII, or really any encoding save its own. Besides, the creator of APL has solved that problem. Take a look at J & co, to see how to do APL in ASCII.
Re:Full Metal Jacket: A Visual Programming Language Based on... by SixSigma on Saturday July 16, 2016 @01:29PM (#12107121)
The point being that the singling out ASCII is survivor bias.

^ ~ | @ # * are not characters to generally be found in handwriting and not just natural inclusions in a character set.

Re:Full Metal Jacket: A Visual Programming Language Based on... by pavlov on Saturday July 16, 2016 @01:36PM (#12107144)
Also, focusing on ASCII often means implicitly focusing on English keyboards to the detriment of other languages.

The ^ and ~ characters are particularly hard to type on many European keyboards. My MacBook's Finnish/Swedish keyboard doesn't even show the tilde ~ character anywhere on the physical layout, and it requires three keypresses to type.

Re:Full Metal Jacket: A Visual Programming Language Based on... by qwertyuiop924 on Saturday July 16, 2016 @01:48PM (#12107199)
I'm not sure that it's survivor bias. Besides, ASCII's long survival is exactly what makes it so important. ASCII has endured for so long, and is embedded in so much software and even some hardware, that even if ASCII is abandoned for a better encoding, there WILL be legacy support for it. You can never be sure that a data format will endure, but ASCII is about as close to that certainty as you can get.