Dan,

>> I came up with, "In x, where do I find y?"

> And you didn't find that mouthful a bit convoluted?  Even the English
sounds backwards to me.
> Plus, it's begs the question somewhat:  you memorized a phrase that
described what iota did
> do, not what you would've expected a "lookup function" to do.

Well, I guess we disagree about how convoluted/backwards my little
phrase was. To a large degree, I am comfortable beginning sentences with
prepositional phrases.

And APL being the first programming language I ever learned, I didn't
have any expectations about what the syntax of a "lookup function" ought
to be, so iota never seemed odd. It thought it was miraculous to have
something so handy at all!

I do agree with Joey Tuttle's statement that, back when J was born, that
would have been the time to make changes like this. But tradition dies
hard, and that's not always a terrible thing.

/Chris 
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