It gets me thinking about the “high context / low context” distinction in natural languages. High context languages are one where the meaning of a symbol depends on the context in which it’s embedded.

It’s a continuum, so English is typically considered low context but it does have some examples. “Free as in freedom versus free as in beer,” is one that immediately comes to mind.

À high context language would be one like Chinese where, for example, the character 过 can be a grammatical marker for experiential aspect, a preposition equivalent to “over” “across” or “through” depending on context, a verb with more English equivalents than I care to try and enumerate, an affix similar to “super-“, etc.

When I was first starting to learn Chinese it seemed like this would be hopelessly confusing. But it turns out that human brains are incredibly well adapted to this sort of disambiguation task. So now that I’ve got some time using the language behind me it’s so automatic that I’m not really even aware of it anymore, except to sit here racking my brain for examples like this for the purpose of relating an anecdote.

I would bet that it’s a similar story for APL: initially seems weird if you aren’t used to it, but not actually a problem in practice.