Comment by 0xTJ
2 days ago
Seeing "all built-in functions and operators are single unicode symbols" stood out to me, given that APL existed well before Unicode did. It's not that it's wrong today, but that wasn't always the case. My father used APL back in high school, and that was before the earliest year mentioned in the "History" section of the Unicode Wikipedia article.
It wasn’t Unicode but it wasn’t ASCII either. I think here unicode is probably shorthand for not ASCII.
Unicode inherited most of APL's encoding sets from EBCDIC code pages. Almost no one would choose to work in EBCDIC today, so it is practical to just say Unicode as the last encoding left standing (for everyone not working on legacy APL code on [emulated] IBM mainframe hardware).