Roger suggested:
> http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/032/falkoff.pdf
I love reading Ken's papers. Or maybe just old APL material in general. Every
time I do, I gain a new insight or appreciation of J. For example, while
reading Table 1: "Notation" on pp 200 of that paper, one reads:
Operation // Notation // Definition
Absolute value // z <- | x // z -: maximum of z and -2
which points out the equivalence of the monad | and the hook >. - . That
is, absolute value can be expressed as (>. -) for real numbers.
Roger, is it really neccesary to ACL the Essay pages? You, yourself, indicated
that you prefer collaborative Wiki efforts [A], but you actively prohibit such
collaboration by ACL'ing Essays you've "contributed". In fact, I do not even
agree that wiki pages should indicate authorship (see, e.g., the essay "A Fine
Line" which I initiated [B]; it contains no attribution. That was intentional:
I sought to encourage others to expand upon it).
In particular, today I found that you'd ACL'd the biliography, which prevented
me from adding a page anchor to a specific biliographic entry. Now I can't
link directly to the the entry for "A Formal Description of System/360"; I must
either link to the top of the Bibliography Essay and let the reader slog
through all the entries until he finds the relevant title, or link directly to
the paper, which defeats the purpose of having a J biliography at all.
This is not the first time the ACLs you've added have frustrated me. Usually,
I don't even want to make changes to the content of these pages; your efforts
would not be sullied by my editing; I merely want to make trivial,
grammatical, or format changes (as in this case, where I want to add an anchor
tag).
As another example: in some of the reports I've submitted to
System/Interpreter/Bugs, I've made spelling or grammar mistakes, which I don't
notice at the time. But later on, reviewing the archived bug reports, the
errors are glaring and personally embarrassing. But, since you've ACL'd the
bug archives, I cannot correct them. They're cast in stone, and available for
the whole world to see.
I ask you to reconsider your policy on ACLing. The Wiki is a collaborative
effort. Pages for which you want sole control and complete credit, can be
created as sub-pages under /RogerHui. That way you wouldn't even need the
"contributed by" tags; both the page titles and URLs would declare your
authorship to the world.
(As a side note, why did you initiate this policy? Have you even had an
experience where an un-ACL'd page was ruined or vandalized by a legitimate Wiki
user?)
-Dan
[A] http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/2007-October/031091.html
[B] http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Essays/A_Fine_Line
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