Hello Donna;
Once I grokked the role of the dot and the colon as "inflections" (I
prefer "accents" myself. J became, to me, as readable as APL. The fact
that J does more, has more primitive verb-modifiers, does make it a
harder read, but only in absolute terms. For what it does, it is quite
straightforward. I recall being one of the few APL'ers I knew who did
not take the ironic stance of deeming J to be unreadable.
dly wrote:
The beauty of APL is not just in the eye of the beholder - there is
intrinsic beauty in an APL expression. Of course clever people can do
math with roman numerals but not as simply, efficiently and elegantly
as with numbers expressed in a consistent base. J not only abandoned
the symbol set of APL, it abandoned the simplicity, consistency and
elegance of APL. However, I have seen few APL programs that were
designed with the consistency and elegance of the APL language because
few APL programmers appreciated and used the grammar and syntax of APL
when they wrote code.
To be readable you need to be able to recognize the morphemes, words,
and sentences which is easy in APL and not so in J.
Donna
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On 18-Dec-07, at 10:49 PM, Joey K Tuttle wrote:
These criticisms are really showing differences in taste rather then
substance.
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|\/| 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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