newRPL: Making RPL more readable

[Claudio L.]

(12-05-2016 07:43 PM)Han Wrote:  If we can use \ for escape characters, perhaps newRPL can use a special escape sequence as an alias for << (the actual character, not my poor representation using two "less than" symbols). Similarly for >>. And \BS for the actual backslash character (or whatever the standard escape sequence is for this character). Maybe \LP and \RP for "left program" and "right program" symbols? This makes it easier to program on a PC without needing character translation.

(Basically, bypassing any translation that would normally occur during file transfers like back in the HP48 days would be good since most people are going to get more speed from their SD card.)

You mean adding a preprocessing step to replace all the backslashes? We could have a separate command to escape/unescape (is that even a word?) those sequences. However, most modern editors on a PC are Unicode compatible, so there's no translation needed, all symbols will look the same on the editor. All you'd need to do is create a few macro key assignments on your favorite editor for the most common RPL symbols.
Right now there's no "translation" during file transfer. All text in newRPL is written as-is to text files. Escaping characters would *add* a translation layer.