Misplaced Pages

The programming language APL uses a number of symbols, rather than words from natural language, to identify operations, similarly to mathematical symbols. Prior to the wide adoption of Unicode, a number of special-purpose EBCDIC and non-EBCDIC code pages were used to represent the symbols required for writing APL.

Character sets

Due to its origins on IBM Selectric-based teleprinters, APL symbols have traditionally been represented on the wire using a unique, non-standard character set. In the 1960s and 1970s, few terminal devices existed which could reproduce them, the most popular ones being the IBM 2741 and IBM 1050 fitted with a specific APL print head. Over time, with the universal use of high-quality graphic display, printing devices and Unicode support, the APL character font problem has largely been eliminated.

Character repertoire

IBM assigns the following character IDs (GCGIDs) to APL syntax, which are used in the definitions of its code pages.

EBCDIC code pages

Code page 293

Code page 293 (CCSID 293), called "APL (USA)", is an EBCDIC code page which includes APL symbols, in addition to preserving the basic Latin letters and Western Arabic numerals at their usual EBCDIC locations.

Code page 310

Code page 310 ("Graphic Escape APL/TN") includes a larger gamut of symbols, but does not itself include the basic Latin letters or the basic digits. It is used alongside Code page 37-2, with the Code page 310 codes being prefixed by the Graphic Escape (EBCDIC 0x08) control character.

Code page 351

Code page 351 ("GDDM Default (USA)") contains most of the characters of Code page 293 and Code page 310 (except ⍷, epsilon with underline) in addition to the letters and digits, by replacing several control characters with symbols.

7-bit modified ASCII

Code page 371 (IR-68)

Code page 371, registered for use with ISO/IEC 2022 as ISO-IR-68, is a 7-bit heavily modified ASCII, designed by the APL Working Group of the Canadian Standards Association, intended for use with APL in an environment allowing overstriking of characters using the BS (backspace, 0x08) control code.

8-bit modified and/or extended ASCII

Code page 907

Code page 907 is used by the IBM 3812, like code page 906.

Code page 909

Code page 909 is another encoding for APL, differing from code page 907 in not including the underlined characters, assigning different codes to the APL characters which fall in the 0xB0–DF range, and replacing some of the C0 replacement graphics from code page 437 with alternative encodings for certain APL symbols.

Code page 910

Code page 910 is similar to code page 909, but with fewer duplicate horizontal arrows, using the same C0 graphics as code page 437, and including some additional characters.

Unicode

Most APL symbols are present in Unicode, in the Miscellaneous Technical range, although some APL products may not yet feature Unicode, and some APL symbols may be unused or unavailable in a given vendor's implementation.

As of 2010, Unicode allows APL to be stored in text files, published in print and on the web, and shared through email and instant messaging. Entering APL characters still requires the use of either a specific input method editor or keyboard mapping, or of a specific touch interface. APL keyboard mappings are available for free for the most common operating systems, or can be obtained by adding the Unicode APL symbols to existing keyboard map.

Underscored alphabetic characters

Missing from Unicode are the traditional underscored alphabetic characters included in some of the APL code pages; their usage has been eliminated or deprecated in most APL implementations. These were produced on APL printing terminals by over-striking a straight capital letter with an underscore character. Some tables show them simulated with underlined and italic markup, not listing Unicode mappings.

IBM assigns them GCGIDs as "LA480000" (which they name "A Line Below Capital/A Underscore (APL)"), "LB480000" ("B Line Below Capital/B Underscore (APL)") and so forth, under the "L" series used for Latin letters. The use of an even number (48) rather than an odd number (47) is due to being uppercase: compare the use of SD110000 for a lone acute accent ´, LA110000 for the lowercase á, and LA120000 for the uppercase Á. They are included in IBM's private use area scheme, encoded in reverse‑alphabetical order in the odd-numbered code points from U+F8BF to U+F8F1.

Homologous uses of 47 include the "SD" (diacritic) series GCGID SD470000 for "Line Below/Discontinuous Underscore"—i.e. macron below, distinct from the ASCII underscore which is SP090000 ("Underline/Continuous Underscore")—and the "A" (Arabic letter) series GCGID AD470009 for the ḏāl, for example. Unicode's Latin Extended Additional block includes the following capital "Line Below" characters with the macron below diacritic, for Semitic transcription (it includes a pre-composed ẖ only in lowercase):

• U+1E06 Ḇ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E0E Ḏ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER D WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E34 Ḵ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E3A Ḻ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER L WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E48 Ṉ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER N WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E5E Ṟ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER R WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E6E Ṯ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER T WITH LINE BELOW
• U+1E94 Ẕ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Z WITH LINE BELOW

However, this does not cover the entire ISO basic Latin alphabet, and IBM's reference glyphs for the APL characters show them both underlined and oblique, and tables simulating them with markup may follow suit. Unicode's Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block includes italic characters for use in notations where they are contrastive with non-italic characters. Unicode also includes combining forms of the macron below and underscore in the Combining Diacritical Marks block; the characters above canonically decompose with the former:

• U+0331 ◌̱ COMBINING MACRON BELOW
• U+0332 ◌̲ COMBINING LOW LINE

Keyboard layout

Note the mnemonics associating an APL character with a letter: ? (question mark) on Q, ⋆ (power) on P, ρ (rho) on R, ⊥ (base value) on B, ⊤ (eNcode) on N, ∣ (modulus) on M and so on. This makes it easier for an English-language speaker to type APL on a non-APL keyboard, providing one has visual feedback on one's screen. Also, decals have been produced for attachment to standard keyboards, either on the front of the keys or on the top of them.

Later IBM terminals, notably the IBM 3270 display stations, had an alternate keyboard arrangement which is the basis for some of the modern APL keyboard layouts in use today.

Further APL characters were available by overstriking one character with another. For example, the log symbol (⍟) was formed by overstriking ⇧ Shift+P with ⇧ Shift+O. This extended the graphic abilities of the earlier teleprinters, but made it more complex to correct errors and edit program lines.

New overstrikes were introduced by vendors as they produced versions of APL tailored to specific hardware, system features, file systems, and so on. Further, printing terminals and early APL cathode-ray terminals were able to display arbitrary overstrikes, but as personal computers rapidly replaced terminals as a data-entry device, APL character support became provided as an APL Character Generator ROM or a soft character set rendered by the display device. With the advent of the modern PC, APL characters were defined in specific fonts, eliminating the distinction between overstruck characters and standard characters.

Finally, the symbols were ratified in Unicode and given specific code points, with unambiguous interpretations, independently of the graphic font.

See also

• APL syntax and symbols
• ISO IR-68

Footnotes

1. ^ There are two naming conventions (which way around "up" and "down" are, and which way around "left" and "right" are) for tack characters, the "London" and "Bosworth" conventions. Which convention is used differs between IBM and Unicode. Naming also differs between composite Unicode characters intended solely for APL (which match IBM naming and use the Bosworth convention) versus plain tacks also intended for other applications (which use the London convention). APL specifications subsequently adopted the London convention. The documentation for Dyalog APL notes that the Unicode naming for composite tacks (and thus the IBM naming for all tacks), which follows the lesser-used "Bosworth" convention, runs contrary to convention in the APL community.
2. Unicode 1.0 had the "APL out" character at U+2301, but it was removed in Unicode 1.0.1.
3. Documented mappings vary.
4. ^ Sharp extension.

References

1. ^ "Graphic Escape APL2/TN - 138". IBM. GCSGID 00963.
2. ^ "Graphic Escape APL2/TN - 138 (chart)" (PDF). IBM. GCSGID 00963.
3. ^ "Graphic character identifiers: Specials, APL symbols". IBM. Archived from the original on 2016-01-22.
4. ^ Tachyon Software (2007-07-31). Code Page 00310: 3270 APL Graphic Escape.
5. ^ Cowan, John (2004-06-29). "ISO-IR-68 to Unicode". Unicode.org. Unicode, Inc. Retrieved 19 June 2017.
6. ^ "x3270 Character Set". x3270 Documentation. Archived from the original on 2018-11-10.
7. ^ "Dyalog Nomenclature: Functions and Operators" (PDF). Dyalog - Documentation Centre. Dyalog APL.
8. ^ "Personal Computer". IBM. CPGID 00437.
9. ^ IBM. Code Page 00907 (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-08-03.
10. ^ IBM. Code Page 00909 (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-08.
11. ^ IBM. Code Page 00910 (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-08.
12. ^ IBM (1997). unicode.nam: Allow the Unicode characters to be specified using either the IBM or PostScript like names. (Included with Borgendale, Ken, OS/2 Codepage and Keyboard Display Tools)
13. ^ Dickey, Leroy J. "The Naming of Tack Symbols". University of Waterloo.
14. ^ Freytag, Asmus; McGowan, Rick; Whistler, Ken (2021-06-14). "Known Anomalies in Unicode Character Names". Unicode Consortium. UTN #27.
15. "Unicode 1.0.1 Addendum" (PDF). The Unicode Standard. 1992-11-03. Retrieved 2024-09-21.
16. ^ "EBCDIC and ASCII Tables". Archived from the original on 2016-08-27.
17. ^ IBM (1996) . "Code Page (CPGID) 00293: APL (USA)". REGISTRY, Graphic Character Sets and Code Pages.
18. ^ Tachyon Software (2007-07-31). Code Page 00293: EBCDIC APL.
19. "IBM Simplified Chinese Graphic Character Set for Extended UNIX Code (EUC)" (PDF). IBM. 1994. C-H 3-3220-132 1994-06.
20. "CCSID 293 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
21. Code Page CPGID 00293 (pdf) (PDF), IBM
22. ^ IBM (1987). "Code Page (CPGID) 00310: Graphic Escape APL/TN". REGISTRY, Graphic Character Sets and Code Pages.
23. xlate - Transliterate Contents of Records, IBM Corporation, 2010 , archived from the original on 2019-06-16, retrieved 2016-10-18
24. IBM. "Appendix G-1. EBCDIC control character definitions". IBM Globalization. Archived from the original on 2018-09-11.
25. "Chapter 5. 3270 Display Station and Printer Code Page Charts (§ APL/APL2 Text Feature Code Page)" (PDF). 3174 Establishment Controller Character Set Reference (3rd ed.). IBM. 1990 . p. 5·6. GA27-3831-02.
26. ^ Code Page CPGID 00310 (pdf) (PDF), IBM
27. ^ Tachyon Software (2007-07-31). Code Page 00351: GDDM Default (USA).
28. "Code Page 00371" (PDF). IBM. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-07-08.
29. ^ Standards Council of Canada (1983-06-01). APL Character Set for Workspace Interchange (PDF). ITSCJ/IPSJ. ISO-IR-68.
30. "The Unicode Standard 5.1 Code Charts: Technical Symbols U+2300-U+23FF" (PDF). Unicode Standard 5.1. Unicode Consortium. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2 October 2008. Retrieved October 12, 2008.
31. ^ "Windows, Latin 1". IBM. CPGID 01252.
32. "OCR B". IBM. GCSGID 00969.
33. "Windows, Arabic (PDF)" (PDF). IBM. CPGID 01256.
34. A more up-to-date keyboard diagram, applicable for APL2 and other modern implementations, is available at WikensOnline Union APL large keyboard layout for Windows Archived March 10, 2012, at the Wayback Machine, actual photo + diagram here Archived April 3, 2015, at the Wayback Machine and NARS2000 APL keyboard layout here.

External links

• IBM code page 293 a.k.a. the APL code page on mainframe computers
• IBM code page 907 a.k.a. the APL ASCII code page

v t e Character encodings
Early telecommunications	Telegraph code Needle Morse Non-Latin Wabun/Kana Chinese Cyrillic Baudot and Murray Fieldata ASCII ISO/IEC 646 BCDIC Teletex and Videotex/Teletext T.51/ISO/IEC 6937 ITU T.61 ITU T.101 World System Teletext background sets Transcode
ISO/IEC 8859	Approved parts -1 (Western Europe) -2 (Central Europe) -3 (Maltese/Esperanto) -4 (North Europe) -5 (Cyrillic) -6 (Arabic) -7 (Greek) -8 (Hebrew) -9 (Turkish) -10 (Nordic) -11 (Thai) -13 (Baltic) -14 (Celtic) -15 (New Western Europe) -16 (Romanian) Abandoned parts -12 (Devanagari) Proposed but not approved KOI-8 Cyrillic Sámi Adaptations Welsh Barents Cyrillic Estonian Ukrainian Cyrillic
Bibliographic use	MARC-8 ANSEL CCCII/EACC ISO 5426 5426-2 5427 5428 6438 6862
National standards	ArmSCII Big5 BraSCII CNS 11643 DIN 66003 ELOT 927 GOST 10859 GB 2312 GB 12345 GB 12052 GB 18030 HKSCS ISCII JIS X 0201 JIS X 0208 JIS X 0212 JIS X 0213 KOI-7 KPS 9566 KS X 1001 KS X 1002 LST 1564 LST 1590-4 PASCII Shift JIS SI 960 TIS-620 TSCII VISCII VSCII YUSCII
ISO/IEC 2022	ISO/IEC 8859 ISO/IEC 10367 Extended Unix Code / EUC
Mac OS Code pages ("scripts")	Armenian Arabic Barents Cyrillic Celtic Central European Croatian Cyrillic Devanagari Farsi (Persian) Font X (Kermit) Gaelic Georgian Greek Gujarati Gurmukhi Hebrew Iceland Inuit Keyboard Latin (Kermit) Maltese/Esperanto Ogham Roman Romanian Sámi Turkish Turkic Cyrillic Ukrainian VT100
DOS code pages	437 668 708 720 737 770 773 775 776 777 778 850 851 852 853 855 856 857 858 859 860 861 862 863 864 865 866 867 868 869 897 899 903 904 932 936 942 949 950 951 1040 1042 1043 1046 1098 1115 1116 1117 1118 1127 3846 ABICOMP CS Indic CSX Indic CSX+ Indic CWI-2 Iran System Kamenický Mazovia MIK
IBM AIX code pages	895 896 912 915 921 922 1006 1008 1009 1010 1012 1013 1014 1015 1016 1017 1018 1019 1046 1124 1133
Windows code pages	CER-GS 932 936 (GBK) 950 1169 Extended Latin-8 1250 1251 1252 1253 1254 1255 1256 1257 1258 1270 Cyrillic + Finnish Cyrillic + French Cyrillic + German Polytonic Greek
EBCDIC code pages	Japanese language in EBCDIC DKOI
DEC terminals (VTx)	Multinational (MCS) National Replacement (NRCS) French Canadian Swiss Spanish United Kingdom Dutch Finnish French Norwegian and Danish Swedish Norwegian and Danish (alternative) 8-bit Greek 8-bit Turkish SI 960 Hebrew Special Graphics Technical (TCS)
Platform specific	1052 1053 1054 1055 1056 1057 1058 Acorn RISC OS Amstrad CPC Apple II ATASCII Atari ST BICS Casio calculators CDC Compucolor 8001 Compucolor II CP/M+ DEC RADIX 50 DEC MCS/NRCS DG International Galaksija GEM GSM 03.38 HP Roman HP FOCAL HP RPL SQUOZE LICS LMBCS MSX NEC APC NeXT PETSCII PostScript Standard PostScript Latin 1 SAM Coupé Sega SC-3000 Sharp calculators Sharp MZ Sinclair QL Teletext TI calculators TRS-80 Ventura International WISCII XCCS ZX80 ZX81 ZX Spectrum
Unicode / ISO/IEC 10646	UTF-1 UTF-7 UTF-8 UTF-16 UTF-32 UTF-EBCDIC GB 18030 DIN 91379 BOCU-1 CESU-8 SCSU TACE16 Comparison of Unicode encodings
TeX typesetting system	Cork LY1 OML OMS OT1
Miscellaneous code pages	ABICOMP ASMO 449 Digital encoding of APL symbols ISO-IR-68 ARIB STD-B24 Fieldata HZ IEC-P27-1 INIS 7-bit 8-bit ISO-IR-169 ISO 2033 KOI KOI8-R KOI8-RU KOI8-U Mojikyō SEASCII Stanford/ITS Symbol TRON Unified Hangul Code
Control character	Morse prosigns C0 and C1 control codes ISO/IEC 6429 JIS X 0211 Unicode control, format and separator characters Whitespace characters
Related topics	CCSID Character encodings in HTML Charset detection Han unification Hardware code page MICR code Mojibake Variable-length encoding
Character sets

v t e APL programming
Features	APL syntax and symbols Direct function (dfn) Code pages Iverson bracket Rank Shared Variables
Implementations	Major Dyalog APL APL2 → APLX SHARP APL NARS → NARS2000° Dialects A → A+° APLNext → VisualAPL ELI GNU APL° J° kdb+ K, Q Polymorphic Programming Language (PPL)
Community	Professional associations Association for Computing Machinery: SIGAPL British APL Association Organizations Business Ampere Analogic Corporation APL2000 CompuServe Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) DNA Systems Dyalog Ltd. IBM I. P. Sharp Associates Kx Systems Micro Computer Machines (MCM) Science Research Associates Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC) Soliton Incorporated Telecompute Integrated Systems, Inc. Time Sharing Resources (TSR) Education Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) University of Maryland People Phil Abrams Bob Bernecky Larry Breed Charles Brenner Fred Brooks Jim Brown Adin Falkoff Patrick E. Hagerty Herbert Hellerman Roger Hui Kenneth E. Iverson Dick Lathwell Eugene McDonnell Robert Metzger Roger Moore Alan Perlis John Scholes J. Henri Schueler Bob Smith Edward H. Sussenguth Jr. Arthur Whitney William Yerazunis Rodnay Zaks Iverson Award
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• APL programming language family
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