The documentation in the dictionary for J primitives is excellent. Not the easiest reading. Foreign conjunction documentation is pretty good, though now needs updating. System libraries used to have comments, though brief and incomplete, at least gave a start on what many of the definitions did. Now the comments are stripped. Why? For size and speed of loading? The disk space used for JQt is many times the space used for all the rest of J put together. The comments are small potatoes.
As to stdlib. Many of the short definitions like "each" are almost useless. First, I hardly know they are there. I browse stdlib occasionally and am surprised to find cute tools I have already created myself the hard way. But I already have created my own tool or now prefer to use the primitive or the simple phrase than the one in stdlib. And with only the name and definition to go by it can be difficult to determine what it is supposed to do. Take "ss" from the newbe perspective. Given only the name and definition, what is it? So he has to look up what the primitives do in the dictionary, make a guess that it requires two arguments and that both are probably text strings to figure out that it probably is short for "string search". Can you see a newbe doing all that? Especially for something that he doesn't even know if he needs? But describing it for a newbe would take at least a decent sentence. Hard to justify for a definition consisting of only one line of nine characters. Documenting is hard to get really useful and boring to do. The J WIKI is really helping a lot for documentation. But finding what you need can be difficult, particularly when one doesn't even know what to look for. On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 9:11 AM, Murray Eisenberg <mur...@math.umass.edu>wrote: > If such basic defined names are buried in stdlib.ijs, then how is a J > newcomer or rusty J old-timer supposed to find out about it? > > Doesn't the J community care any more about such folks? > > Murray > . . . ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
