On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 12:02 PM, Olivier N. <[email protected]> wrote: >> Correct. Here you have replaced the fork (57 = _:) with the hook (57&= _:) > > That's why I said “nearly”. I can't see the fork in (57 = _:). > Or do I have to consider 57 as a verb? That's strange to me.
Yes, I'm so used to that rule I often forget that it's something special (and, if viewed from a perspective trained by other languages, an unusual rule). km's message references http://www.jsoftware.com/docs/help701/dictionary/dictf.htm which mentions this rule somewhere in the middle. Restated, you can use a noun in the left tine of a fork (this would be syntactically invalid if we didn't have a special rule allowing it). That noun N gets treated as the verb N"_ (in other words it's a contant function that has N as its result). It can't be a combining verb (what would be the point?) and it can't be the right most verb (because otherwise it would be a noun phrase rather than a verb phrase, and a train is a verb phrase). Restated again, when we have a context where all we can use is verbs, a noun can be a shorthand for a verb which produces it as a result. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
