David Vincent-Jones wrote: > There are cleaver ways to avoid the problem .. but remember that x and y are > probably the most common of all mathematical variable names that are now > being boxed into a special significance. > > The names x., y. et all were special and looked special; fine but > eliminating any part of the a through Z series as regular nouns I believe to > be unfortunate.
Your messages suggest that you misunderstand the change. Certainly your comments that "x and y cannot be assigned and are no longer regular nouns" are incorrect. So at my risk of belaboring the point, the changes made in J6 are: 1. A noun cannot be assigned both locally and globally in the same definition. 2. y is assigned locally as the right argument (as well as y.), and same for x etc. These mean that your definition of test fails: test=:3 : 0 x=:3+4 y=:1+2 ax's ) But this definition works: test=:3 : 0 x=.3+4 y=.1+2 ax's ) So the effect of the change on verb test is that the global assignment to y will not work. I don't think this change is so bad - how often do you really want to define a global named "y"? This is unlikely in production code. I have typically made such assignments only when debugging definitions. I agree there is now an inconvenience in not being able to do so, but I regard this as minor. If you look at the scripts, you will notice that x, y etc are still assigned in definitions, e.g. search the scripts for: 'x y w h'=. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
