> I teach the kids that 'scalar' and 'atom' mean a rank-0 thing, and
> 'array' means rank > 0. Yeah, I know it's not standard.
I was certainly taught that "APL scalars are rank-0 arrays" and
"all APL values are arrays" right at the beginning, and in particular
I can remember that
rho 5
rho rho 5
0
was used to drive that point home. (Well, it might have been a
value different from 5.)
I was taught in Physics at school that scalars could be viewed as
zero-dimensional things. I cannot time my introduction into the
concept of "hyper-planes" and the dimensional aspect of a "point"
in the context of vector algebra (I believe it was still in school,
too.) APL certainly wasn't the first context in my life which
treated scalars as zero-dimensional things. It was just the first
programming language I came across which treated them as such.
Finally!
Martin
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