Chris has mentioned that he found it hard getting PM to manage script 
dependencies, I imagine managing dependencies at the individual 
verb/adverb/conjunction level would be worse.

I was always bothered by )COPY in APL because it meant that I ended up with 
multiple copies of the same function. If I fixed a bug or improved one of those 
functions, I then had to find all the different workspaces that had copied it. 
I'm sure there were/are solutions, but I never figured them out. The ability to 
"require" scripts was one of the things that I really appreciated when I moved 
to J and is also one my motivations for creating Addons - the addon becomes the 
central source for that code. 
I can understand the desire to have a clean script with no redundant code but 
as long as most of the definitions are loaded into locales (something else I 
really appreciated coming from APL+Win) then the extra code included but not 
required doesn't impact too much IMO. 

> From: Don Guinn
> 
> Hope this isn't too far off topic; however, one thing that has bothered
> me
> about building standalone scripts is the granularity of scripts and
> requiring them. You get everything in the script whether or not you
> need it
> all. I really liked the )COPY command in APL as I could get specific
> things
> from other workspaces without having to include a lot of things not
> needed.
> For example: I want to do plots but I will do them using "pd" only. Why
> should I have to include the verb "plot" and all the things it needs
> which
> are not needed for "pd"? Perhaps the writers of the plot script felt
> the
> same way since they defined a verb called "cut" in jzplot.ijs which
> does the
> same thing as the verb "cut" in strings.ijs . They didn't want to pull
> in
> all the other definitions in strings.ijs that they didn't need.
> 
> But the problem with )COPY is that it must list the required name and
> all
> other names the name needs. Somehow the verb "pd" should specify the
> additional names it needs etc.
> 
> On Wed, Oct 14, 2009 at 11:24 PM, Chris Burke <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> 
> > The main problem I found with the standalone script business is that
> the
> > build is often too complex to be done entirely by clicking options in
> a
> > dialog, but still easy to do in J. So I found myself writing fairly
> > simple scripts that did builds.
> >
> > I still want to retain a simple build capability in future, just to
> > assemble the set of scripts in the project into one, but no more than
> > that. This is good enough for many projects.
> >
> > The dependencies tool could be a standalone utility. The code is
> already
> > there in Project Manager, but needs to be extended to support addons.
> >
> > Sherlock, Ric wrote:
> > > I'm thinking that even if standalone script logic was decommitted,
> it
> > would still be nice to have some sort of tool for listing the
> dependencies
> > of a script or project?
> > >
> > >> From: bill lam
> > >>
> > >> One reason why code in PM is so complicated is the requirement to
> > >> build standalone script.  But it is, as now, still incomplete in
> that
> > >> only J base library can be handled, all other script including
> addon
> > >> cannot.
> > >
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