I very much appreciate these operators when they are needed. When only
used as padding they seem like a huge complication both for readability
and writeability. /Erling
On 2014-07-15 01:03, Tracy Harms wrote:
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
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