Have these students been doing any programming in BASIC? As far as J being different from APL or mathematical notation, the only thing weird at the secondary school level is the use of % for division if you stay away from vectors. Plus, minus, multiplication and exponent are the same as in BASIC. You can define some cover verbs for the students to load like log10, ln and a few others. Put the arguments in parentheses just like in BASIC. Use parentheses to avoid hierarchical problems. J won't care. Shouldn't be that much different at that level. ln=:^. NB. Cover function ln(10) 2.30259 sum=:+/ NB. Cover function sum(2,3,5,6) 16
Seems like this might be close enough to the mathematical notation so as not confuse the students with J's extensions to mathematical notation that seem to be bothering you. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
