lettered titles notwithstanding, I'm not persuaded...
metaperl.j wrote:
Oleg Kobchenko wrote:
Like Lisp and APL/J/K, they all have very simple (to parse)
langauge syntax: no precedence etc; dynamically typed;
use live objects which can mutate (as opposed to C++).
I dont think J syntax is easy to parse. Certainly not as easy as Scheme, for
instance.
Whether this is a result of more familiarity with Scheme than with J, I
cannot tell.
Also, I asked a Ph.D in CS with emphasis on Compiler Design (who is the
author of SableCC, the parser generator that is superior to ANTLR and
JavaCC) about parsing J and here is what he said:
http://lists.sablecc.org/pipermail/sablecc-discussion/msg00146.html
When I look at the attack on 'a b myFunc c d myfunc e f' I first see it
as a syntax error: {{n n v n n v n n}} does not work, despite my
fondness for strand notation. What does it matter that it seems ambiguous?
Basically J is very ambiguous to parse. And the overloading of symbols for
monadic and dyadic cases complicates things even more.
I'm not sure how the monadic/dyadic thing comes into play. {{n dv n}}
versus {{n dv mv n}} seems simple enough.
And also, data representation in J is not parseable. A rank-90 array of
shape 1 in each axis looks just like a simple scalar.
I would term that 'data output is noninvertible.' IME, that's a
limitation with essentially all languages.
But I suppose there might be some module designed for representing J data in
a way that allows for easy export/import.
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
|\/| Randy A MacDonald | APL: If you can say it, it's done.. (ram)
|/\| ramacd <at> nbnet.nb.ca |
|\ | | The only real problem with APL is that
BSc(Math) UNBF'83 | it is "still ahead of its time."
Sapere Aude | - Morten Kromberg
Natural Born APL'er |
-----------------------------------------------------(INTP)----{ gnat }-
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