On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 12:06 PM, Dan Bron <j...@bron.us> wrote: > In my quick research, I couldn't find any "natural" way to do this similar > to %__ (that is, by using only primitives and staying within the language > proper). But if you want to experiment with imaginary negative zeros, you > can use foreigns to fiddle with the internal representation of nouns: > ...
I wonder if there's a use for a foreign that normalizes strange bit patterns in floating point values? > The fundamental problem is that f"r^:_1 is always calculated as f^:_1"r, > which is fine when the rank of f's output is the same as its input (r), but > when it's not, one has to jump through hoops to use &. . The hoops aren't > particularly difficult, but they can destroy the elegance of an expression. ... > And this is not the only place this twist (that the inverse of f"r retains > the rank r) shows up. Consider, for example, Henry Rich's puzzle: "Produce > an expression in which >"0 produces a different result than plain > does." > [2]. Can you think of such a situation? Do you think there _should be_ > such a situation? Since J is open source, now, we can have a new facet to these kinds of discussions -- different people willing to read J's source for how it handles this issue could talk about implications of observations (such as those I've trimmed out here) on the implementation and on potential variations... FYI, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
