Raul Miller wrote:
> Though, now that you've identified it, it seems
> like some simple examples should make the issue
> clear:
> _ 1 _1 +3
> _ 4 2
>
Part of the problem for the students in Steven
Phillips' example may be that in written Japanese
whitespace is not significant. I hear that students
who study Japanese can find the absence of semantic
whitespace confusing; the reversed situation could be
even rougher when it comes to J.
> A more general issue, that matters for any
> learning situation, is that students who are not
> able to recognize and understand the words
> generally have problems understanding sentences
> which use those words.
Undoubtedly, their absence of understanding the words
is of great importance here. The ambivalence and
overloading of J (necessary though it is) makes it
such that these students are inadvertantly using the
infinity symbol. All becomes clear when they know
that word, I suppose, but in this case the difficulty
of understanding a sentence that includes infinity
suggests that a student of J may need to understand
the infinity primitive in order to learn how to read
and write statements involving negative numbers. This
is a side-effect of the density of meaning in J
primitives. Small typographic errors easily result in
big changes of meaning, and primitives that are
stumbled upon in this way will naturally be unknown to
those who are susceptible to such mistakes.
It seems to me that this all revolves around the
terrific "leverage" provided by J. Some people who
seek out J because of this leverage; count me among
them. Other people have no such interest, so they may
be less than thrilled when a slight deviation in
typing invokes an unfamiliar area of mathematics, or
the like. The core problem here, I'd wager, comes
from presenting J to students who had no serious
desire to learn it.
Tracy Harms
--
Perhaps the most important habit in the
development of good style in a language
[is] the habit of critical reading.
Kenneth E. Iverson
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