Erling Hellenäs, It doesn't take much to get a set of language features that make all other language features technically unnecessary or redundant. This comes with computational universality, as sketched here: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing-complete
What makes it attractive to see verb trains as fundamental is the way they have been tied to lexical adjacency. This is among the most noteworthy aspects of the design of J as a language. Verb trains are incredibly easy to create because they rely mainly on adjacency (and the absence of nouns in the role of arguments to verbs, which also involves adjacency rules.) Where do we get this idea that verb trains are "fundamental" while modifiers (a.k.a. operators, if we follow Heaviside) are ancillary? What most accommodates that notion is Cap, which is one of relatively few irregularities in a language that (in part) came out of an effort to rationalize, i.e. remove inconsistencies. With Cap set aside the role of modifiers becomes clear, to my view. I advise contemplating the qualities of tacit J without Cap, for awhile. -- Tracy Harms On Jul 13, 2014 11:33 AM, "Erling Hellenäs" <[email protected]> wrote: > It is not possible to reformulate the verb trains with caps so that most > of the &'s and @'s are no longer needed? So that it is shown they had no > actual function? /Erling > > On 2014-07-13 17:20, Tracy Harms wrote: > >> On Jul 13, 2014 6:41 AM, "Erling Hellenäs" <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> Most of the &'s and @'s are written not because they are needed >>> as operators, but are used only as padding, to avoid the othervise >>> automatic creation of hooks and forks? >>> >> No. It seems inaccurate to call that "padding." They apply at a >> meta-level. >> They do not interfere with the formation of verb trains, they contribute >> to >> the formation of verb trains. >> >> -- >> T >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> 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
