I wrote: > ... ,&":&.> ... REB wrote: > I would prefer > ... (,~ ":)&.> ...
I actually considered this as I wrote the line, and decided &": was more elegant. My reasoning was along the same lines that ] can be considered elegant. In literal ,&": numeric the format is applied to both arguments equally; neither is treated "specially", and ": is defined such that for literal values it acts like ] . That is, I'm leveraging a useful feature of ": in order to avoid special handling; these my code shorter, cleaner, and more fluent. Anyway, my main motivation was to avoid the extra pair of parens. I find scanning J code becomes slower for every extra set of parens, particularly nested parens. Not to say I gave this line a lot of consideration; these were just idle, half-heard thoughts as I typed my way from the right to the left. I've definitely used the (,~ ":) idiom before and I agree it can draw the reader's attention to the differences between the left and right arguments, if that's what you want him to focus on. -Dan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
