Jose Mario Quintana quoted Cliff Reiter: > I can't imagine I would favor using one letter uninflected names > for arguemnts. I would be embarrsed if I had to tell my students > here is a list of one letter names you can't use as temporary > variables without danger of confusion.
The simple approach here is: "one letter lower-case variables are reserved by the language". Presto, no list to memorize. The advantages are: 1) locale arguments become easier to use, without introducing special syntax where the locale is identified using an expression. 2) syntactically, arguments are just variables like any other, and arguments are more concise than with x., y., ... (Presumably, this also makes the interpreter simpler.) > However, I would see changing > x. y. m. n. u. v. to x y m n u v > as making it more difficult to distinguish temporary variables > from reserved argument names and I think using the inflections > makes it easy to expect special meaning for the symbols. I think there are issues here but, as stated, this seems like one of the lesser issues. x y m n u v are temporary variables. They are pre-initialized with argument values in some contexts, but that should be the only way they are special. (We apparently have a bug where this is not the case -- but that looks like nothing more than a bug.) -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
