I understand. J has lots of facilities, comparable to other languages in facilities though very compact. Difficult to learn the full capabilities, but easy to use subsets at the beginning and get real work done. And I lied about fully understanding rank. I think I do, but I've thought that before.
To me, the difference in J and traditional languages is that the handling arrays and the concept of modifiers is natural, where in other languages it is clearly an extension. Long ago, when dealing with showing APL to others, non-programmers had no trouble with understanding APL, but programmers had lots of problems. Too much to unlearn. Back in the old days of FORTRAN and COBOL we didn't have the luxury of interactive programming. Lots of time between batch runs to think about the problem. Lots of busy work defining structures and so on. More time to contemplate. Now we don't have that time to contemplate the problem. Too easy to just try another way. Great debugging tools so it's easier to not think. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
