Kbd VS bqn-libs

Should you wish to type them on a normal keyboard:

https://abrudz.github.io/lb/apl has a browser bookmarklet which adds an APL language bar to the top of any web page so you can type in any input box with backtick prefixes.

https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd has a Windows Input Method Editor (IME) that adds system-wide RightAlt+letter combos.

:d) https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd

I use setxkbmap -layout us,apl -variant ,dyalog -option grp:switch on Linux and https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd on Windows.

This might have been true a couple of years ago but it is totally untrue now.

I'm not sure why you couldn't use the student version of Dyalog? Sounds like it would have been fine. There are also many more FOSS implementations of array languages now, such as ngn/k and April. https://github.com/phantomics/april

'only available for Linux' - not true https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd/ and others (also different input modes like `w for ⍵)

'no community support' - on the contrary there is a big and helpful APL community https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Chat_rooms_and_forums that is (imo) more useful than stackoverflow

'Dynamic scoping...' - Dyalog's (and other APL's) dfns have lexical scope.

'The language is extremely terse' - is this meant to be a bad thing?

'The code tends to be very hacky' - maybe if you write bad code or try and write C in APL (it won't work)

In general programming I like to use a keyboard layout which allows typing APL glyphs with Right Alt: https://github.com/abrudz/Kbd

Languages with multidimensional arrays (APL, BQN, J, but not K) have trouble with dicts because an index into an array is a list of numbers, and an index into a dict is an arbitrary value. Many primitives, and especially selection, are designed around lists of numbers and don't transfer to dicts. In K, where the index into a list is one number, there's still a requirement that the keys in a dict all have the same level of nesting, but this isn't bad in practice. BQN will eventually have hashmaps implemented as in a more mainstream/conventional way, as objects. There's a model at https://github.com/mlochbaum/bqn-libs/blob/master/hashmap.bq... .

I don't think studying the compiler is a very good way to learn BQN, but I would like to write up parts of it (limited by time and motivation of course). I did some chat sessions on this sort of compilation during early development; see the links at the bottom of https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/ .