I made the following statement years ago:
> definition in J should be given for all the rest. I strongly suspect that
> the number of basic primitives is not larger than the rank of the
following
> noun:
>
> ;:'" {:: ] > @ ; $ , < + - # {. } = { ` ~ i. ^: -. e. & ;:' NB. Basic
> primitives
(see the quote in
http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2001-November/008262.html
for some reason some of my old messages can not be displayed properly)
The basis for the claim is that a tacit Turing machine emulator was written
using those primitives (thus, it is, in principle, as powerful as any other
Turing complete language which includes J itself). Most likely it is not
minimal, in that sense, because when the emulator was written no much effort
was made to make it so; but it might not be far away. The tricky question
is: could one show that a given set is minimal?
> On Behalf Of Raul Miller
> Sent: Thursday, May 10, 2007 8:41 AM
> To: General forum
> Subject: [Jgeneral] "minimal j"
>
> Has anyone gone through and tried to identify a "minimal J core
> language"?
>
> Dan Bron's PrimitivePrimitives wiki page seems like a step in
> this direction, but it's not really focussed on identifying a core
> J lexicon.
>
> For example, the | dyad can be defined as #:"0 or, if you're not
> concerned with issues of rank you can simply use #: to replace |
>
> In other words, by "minimal J lexicon" I am concerned not with
> identifying the "simplest words" but identifying the "smallest
> set of words which encompass J's computational model".
>
> Also, perhaps obviously, monads need different treatment
> from dyads -- I'm thinking of this more from a didactic perspective
> than as a practical exercise.
>
> Even so, I'm wondering if someone else might have already
> approached this issue.
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
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