There may be exceptions to many of the basic rules I will describe on the "Read This First" pages. Those exceptions should be pointed out as such, when they are encountered in the actual NuVoc pages..
The concepts on the RTF page will be specified as true "in most cases" and any exceptions will not be covered there. I believe that it is more important in the beginning to get the "big picture" right, without cluttering it up with exception cases for the newbie. This is one of the critical differences between a formal reference and a tutorial reference. Formal reference definitions must cover exception cases and edge conditions as part of the definition. Tutorials can bend the rules and simplify, all in the cause of learning-curve slope. Exceptions to a general rule can can be explained in an "advanced" section, or better yet, when they occur naturally in the tutorial text. Many languages' complex syntax and non-regular parsing would cause this plan to stumble badly. J's regular syntax and simple parsing rules makes the defining of basic concepts in an initial RTF doc fairly straightforward. Skip Cave Raul Miller wrote: > On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Skip Cave <[email protected]> wrote: > >> pages. Concepts like "J primitives consist of either one or two ASCI >> symbols", "primitives can have just right, or right and left arguments", >> "execution is from right to left", and "there is no precedence for >> primitives" are some of the most basic concepts that a newbie needs to >> understand, before jumping into the NuVoc pages. >> > > &.: has different precedence from {:: > gular > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
