Terrence, When we're trying to be strict and unambiguous, we use the formal name of primitives (sometimes modified with an adjective indicating the valence of interest), as in "dyadic i. ". When we're being informal, context is usually sufficient to determine the primitive in question, and primitives have been denoted with informal names that don't even appear in the Dictionary.
In particular, have a look at the last paragraph of Section III of the dictionary. From http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dict3.htm : Although a name (such as foreign for !:) is suggested for each word, others can be used in addition to or instead of them. Thus, joy might be used for ! since the exclamation mark derives from an I placed above an o, an abbreviation of the Latin io. Similarly, iota might be used instead of integers and index of for i. . FYI, according to http://mathworld.wolfram.com/WholeNumber.html some authors use "whole number" to mean a number with a fractional part of zero. The article suggests the least ambiguous name for the result of monadic i. is "non-negative integers", and for monadic i: , just "integers". OTOH, it might be a fun contest or exercise to come up with a concise, accurate, unique name for monadic i: . The Dictionary will probably not change, but word games are fun. I'll start: "integer neighborhood". -Dan PS: The DoJ is a deeply considered, meticulously designed reference. That doesn't mean that the DoJ it doesn't contain bugs and ambiguities; it has and it does. But it does mean that unless the bug is obvious (e.g. a spelling error), a change will require a very strong supporting argument. This argument is going to have to outweigh the cost of incorporating the change (evaluating whether the change alters the semantics of the relevant entry, whether it makes the relevant entry less concise, whether it will have second order effects (interactions with other entries), whether it introduces new vocabulary into the documentation, whether it conforms to the existing tone and style, etc etc etc). In other words, you're going to have a hard time convincing Roger to make semantic changes to the DoJ. Historically, he's only made such changes at the suggestions veteran members of the J community, and usually he uses his own formulation for the change, rather than the wording suggested (i.e. he publicly recognizes the problem, but uses his own solution). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
