Hello Dan;
I'm sure I have arrived late to this thread, so please forgive me if I
repeat other posts:
I reject the statement:
if J is a notation, then we should be able to read it without the aid of the
interpreter.
I'm sure that musical notation is only readable without an instrument by
only a few, yet it is no less a notation.
To suggest that using the interpreter to decipher a sentence is cheating
is offensive to a methodology I've used since J was in its infancy.
I'm sure these issues are covered in the thread elsewhere, but I'll
state them here to be sure.
A similar problem: write J code to do X. In many cases, I can not
immediately decipher the proposed solution, but I can generate eerily
similar code by thinking the problem on my own. Maybe sometimes I can't
read what is said, but I wind up saying the same thing.
Dan Bron wrote:
So, we often hear complaints that J is terse to the point of being cryptic.
That it is unreadable. Let's see if that's true.
Here's a piece of J code I adapted from some APL I came across on the net:
(#~ ] -.@:e. [: , */~)@:(2 + i.)
It's a monad whose input is a scalar integer. What is its output? What does
the verb do?
Now, no cheating: if J is a notation, then we should be able to read it
without the aid of the interpreter. Don't experiment to deduce its function;
don't even validate your hypothesis in the interpreter. Just work one out and
post it here.
You might also post how long it took you to work out, and maybe what your
thought process was. Or post a counter-challenge -- perhaps slightly more
difficult.
I'm thinking of involving other communities in this game, so if you have a
favorite non-J language, you could also translate this function into that
language (using its natural style) and post that, too. Whatever you feel like.
-Dan
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|\/| Randy A MacDonald | APL: If you can say it, it's done.. (ram)
|/\| ramacd <at> nbnet.nb.ca |
|\ | | The only real problem with APL is that
BSc(Math) UNBF'83 | it is "still ahead of its time."
Sapere Aude | - Morten Kromberg
Natural Born APL'er |
-----------------------------------------------------(INTP)----{ gnat }-
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