APL2 and the internet

Abstract

From the very beginning, the APL community has struggled with displaying and printing APL characters. People normally use specialized programs and fonts to edit APL code. The fonts usually work by providing APL characters for code points originally intended for other characters. This technique is troublesome when sharing data with other applications because it often can't be determined reliably whether a particular code point represents an APL character or some other character. To make matters worse, the different APL vendors assign the APL characters to different code points.Recently these problems have arisen on the Internet. People want to use APL on web pages, in email, and in news groups. A variety of schemes have been proposed to address the problem. However, most of these schemes use keywords and require extra effort on the part of the users.With the widespread acceptance of Unicode, it is now easy to use APL characters on the Internet. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) provide unambiguous, reliable support for Unicode APL characters.The APL2 NETTOOLS workspace provides an HTTP/1.1 conditionally compliant server. This server is Unicode enabled and so provides native support for APL characters in web pages. Using the APL2 Keyboard Handler, APL characters can even be typed in web browsers.