Re: [Bug-apl] assignment to many variables

[Juergen Sauermann]

Hi Alex, in APL you do not pass variables to a function, you pass values. In your example I believe you could (conceptually) something like this: fun (a b c ...)←1 (2 3) 4 ... Since you pass values and not variables, the vector assignment above is not needed and you could pass the value directly (the advantage or maybe disadvantage of the vector assignment above is that an incorrect number of arguments will be detected before fun is called, and that the number of items is made explicit): fun 1 (2 3) 4 ... inside the function, you then simply "undo" the above "assignment": ∇fun B (a b c ...) ← B ... /// Jürgen On 02/11/2016 03:27 AM, alexwei...@alexweiner.com wrote: Hi Bug-APL, In the context of passing many variables to a function, I am worried that I am going to forget the parenthesis, since its a really subtle thing:       (a b)←1 2       a 1       b 2       a b←1 2  1  1 2       a 1       b 1 2 Also here, I find binding strength a bit misleading, since the correctly parenthesis'd version correctly throws an error, but the incorrect version passes an 'unanticipated' value if a is previously defined. If 'a' does not exist then an error is also correctly thrown:       a b←1 2 3  1  1 2 3       a 1       b 1 2 3         ⎕ex'a' 1       a b←1 2 3 VALUE ERROR       a b←1 2 3       ^ I don't think any change is necessary in GNU APL.  I'm just wondering if there are different approaches to passing many variables to a function. Any suggestions? -Alex