Thanks Ric,
Your comments are very helpful and will guide me in rethinking what I am
trying to get at. It is my time to digest, but I hope to be back!
Thanks again,
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: "Sherlock, Ric" <[email protected]>
To: "General forum" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 12:31 AM
Subject: Re: [Jgeneral] J with APL
> Hi Don,
> Firstly just want to say that I'm impressed with the thought and effort
> that you've obviously put in to this. I think this issue appears a number
> of times in the forum archive, but as far as I'm aware you are the first
> to do more than just talk about it!
> I apologise in advance if my comments below seem to be rather negative but
> I hope, like me, you prefer negative feedback to none!
>
> Re: ideas for symbols & notation.
>
> I find the use of boxes around symbols (eg. for i and F quite ugly and
> they tend to break my perception of the sentence as a whole and make me
> want to focus on that particular symbol as being self-contained rather
> than as interacting with the surrounding symbols.
>
> I can see the recognition benefits of using the square root symbol, but I
> don't like the proposed symbol for square and the disadvantage is that the
> consistency of the symbols used in J is lost (*: %: +: -:) If I remember
> that *: is square then it follows that %: is square root - same goes for
> double & halve.
>
> You suggest that a verb followed by an adverb should be underlined to show
> that a new verb is formed- I'm not sure that that concept scales very well
> when multi-symbol verbs or adverbs/conjunctions are involved. Should the
> following tacit verb followed by an adverb all be underlined? If so should
> +/ and the other underline be nested?
> (+/ % #)\
> I think that the use of display methods such as:
> http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/OlegKobchenko/Map%20Display
> may be of more use here.
>
> In my earlier post, I suggested that it would be good to separate the
> ideas regarding symbols from your ideas on an adverb alternative to fork.
> Part of my reason for this is that my impression from your paper (rightly
> or wrongly) is that you have not really understood the tacit form and the
> relationship between the tacit form, the explicit form and sentences
> entered in the session.
>
> Entered in the session this is an explicit sentence that contains a tacit
> bit:
> <. 0.5 + (+/ % #) C
> Assigning that same sentence to a name says that the whole sentence should
> be interpreted as tacit. It would be the same as entering this into the
> session:
> (<. 0.5 + (+/ % #)) C
> Which is the same as:
> (<. 0.5 + +/ % #) C
> These are both evaluated as two forks and a hook.
> To get the desired answer you could enter the following sequence of 3
> forks in the session.
> ([: <. 0.5 + +/ % #) C
>
> Note also that the tacit J code you give for calculating standard
> deviation does not give the correct answer.
>
> In terms of portability and security I'd prefer .pdf over .doc any day! I
> suspect Raul was suggesting the content would be better in the wiki.
>
> Ric
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: [email protected] [mailto:general-
>> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Don Watson
>> Sent: Friday, 13 March 2009 10:03
>> To: General forum
>> Subject: [Jgeneral] J with APL
>>
>> Everyone seems to be talking about different issues than the one I was
>> addressing on this thread. I would greatly appreciate help from anyone
>> who
>> is willing to read the paper and commented on it.
>>
>> In my proposal, nothing changes for J programmers. Keying is
>> done in identical ASCII, storage is done in identical ASCII,
>> transmission
>> between systems is done in identical ASCII, mailing is done in
>> identical
>> ASCII and every user of J continues using ASCII in exactly the same way
>> without knowing that anything has happened. The change is transparent
>> and
>> causes none of the difficulties that are being discussed.
>>
>> The change is solely intended to assist those who are learning
>> Mathematics
>> and very casual users of J. It allows them, in effect, to say to the
>> system:
>> "When you come to write my J language statements to the screen or to
>> the
>> printer, I want you to look up every two character primitive in which
>> the
>> second character is a "." or a ":", in a table and use the special
>> symbol
>> you find there instead - that's all. This is easy to do.
>>
>> There is a second component to the proposal to do with adding a second
>> kind
>> of fork. Again, it is an addition that no J programmer need know
>> anything about or ever use. It is proposed that for this fork any J
>> expression is permitted on either branch of the fork and to the left of
>> the
>> fork - not just a verb. This makes it lot easier to parallel
>> mathematical
>> formulae in tacit programming for those learning to apply mathematical
>> formulae.
>>
>> The handwritten script I posted was a mess and the pdf form was not
>> popular.
>> I have created the primitive symbols in Paint and added them into a
>> word
>> document. This revised paper has now replaced the previous one at:
>>
>> http://bcompanion.com/Compromisedoc.doc
>>
>> Thanks
>>
>> Don Watson
>>
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