On Mon, Nov 1, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > Tacit programming _isn't_ "really quite easy". In principle, maybe... > But in practice it's as much a strain as coding in 68000 ASM. (Yes, > done that -- and sold the result). > > And that, I think, is the way to look at it. Those who can do it can > justly be proud of their skill. But nobody is ashamed of not being > able to compose 68000 machine code in their heads without computer > assistance, so why should they be when it's tacit J?
Mm.... but tacit programming can indeed be "really quite easy", unless you try and be comprehensive about it. +/ .* That is tacit programming. The only thing different from APL is that in APL, you would not have needed the slash. In APL, that slash was implicit, most of the time, whenever you used the dot operator. (Jot was the exception.) Likewise: +/ Again, that is tacit programming. Of course, J introduced forks, which are new. And J has a bunch of what an APL programmer would call operators, which were not in APL. And all of those operators need to be learned, if you want a comprehensive understanding. And forks? Well... they are sort of an implicit operator, in certain circumstances (when the last thing on the right is a verb). But mostly they are a new pattern to be learned -- once you know the pattern (which takes a few examples to really understand, and a few more examples to see how they work when mixed in with other "operators"), it should all fall into place. But J also has hooks, and when hooks get mixed in with forks, things can be confusing. There, it's not just new vocabulary you need to deal with -- if you mix a hook in with a fork, you have something rather strange going on. (The fork will never be used dyadically, for example.) As a result, you wind up having to count how many verbs are in a train. It's not just one pattern but two completely different patterns. And distinguishing the odd cases from the even cases can be tedious for long trains. But if you do not need to be comprehensive, you can ignore some or maybe most of these issues... -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
