On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 1:21 AM, Erling Hellenäs <[email protected]> wrote: > My article contains some points supposed to show that the tacit J syntax is > a "total mess of utter complexity".
This is the crux of the discussion, I think. It's one thing to argue that tacit expressions can be confusing as they involve rewriting equivalent explicit phrases (which is a fair point), it's another to then ignore their utility and expressiveness in a dismissive way (both here and in your article). Put differently: it's great to see your work in this area (thanks for sharing) but the tone strikes me as problematic if you're actually looking to invite constructive comments. I can appreciate your focusing on regular parsing rules (as per K, Q and Dyalog d-fns) but stating things like "The tacit J syntax is a total mess of utter complexity" just seems lazy. Further, as Raul points out, [: – [: – [: – [: – ] is a rather boring example (and yes, a strawman). To me this scans as: "Hey, look how terrible Your Favourite Language L is, where to raise something to the power of 5 you have to do: X * X * X * X * X" never mind that there's an exponentiation operator; move along, move along. More constructively: See Roger's comments on whether J should have provided a hook conjunction rather than the train syntax we have now; to me, that's a more interesting discussion and touches on some of your criticisms of length, arity, etc. Personally I think forks are one of the most important ideas in J. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
