I liked this quote:

"Note that J's aggregate-data operators tend to keep execution in the
'leaf' primitives of the program, so this is rather more efficient than one
might imagine.  (http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/pousse.htm)

Also, don't forget that developer time is expensive and that correctness is
still important.  Perhaps a good middle ground between tacit and explicit
is the use of the flatten verb f.

Recently, I came to appreciate the use of a control try-catch in the _z_
locale (4 : '...') inside an otherwise tacit expression.  Elegant.  I
suspect there are other hidden gems like this in the _z_ locale.

-Steven


On 31 January 2013 10:27, km <[email protected]> wrote:

> I very much like Raul's summary of explicit and tacit below.  Explicit is
> "show me an example" and tacit is "show me the procedure".
>
> I know explicit verbs can have tacit parts and tacit verbs can have
> explicit parts!
>
>     mean =: 3 : '(+/ % #)y'
>     sumofsq =: +/&(3 : '*: y')
>     mean 1 2 2 4 6
>  3
>     3 sumofsq 4
>  25
>
> Kip Murray
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
>
> On Jan 30, 2013, at 8:14 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Personally, I like being able to understand verbs in terms of "what
> > they do to nouns".  But I agree that it's also worthwhile being able
> > to have abstract concepts of how they work.
> >
> > --
> > Raul
> > ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm

Reply via email to