Are you saying that if I define floor =: (<. : (<.@]))"0 _ 0
that it does not have integrated rank support? The criticism about english and documentation seems hollow to me. I don't say that Nuvoc is useless because it hasn't been implemented in 150 languages. An ability to read the dictionary in English is essential to learn J, and code typically uses english shaddows from profile.ijs. Making foreign language cover verbs including autotranslating the english ones is straightforward, and answers that part of the criticism. Using the exact names from the dictionary (what I'm refering to as autodocumentation because the exact same place you would look up i. is where iota will be explained.) seems like an elegant way to ease a shallow learning curve on the process. The entire criticism could be applied to "you should never assign a verb to any name" ----- Original Message ----- From: Raul Miller <rauldmil...@gmail.com> To: Programming forum <programm...@jsoftware.com> Sent: Friday, November 27, 2015 3:27 PM Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] dyadic J On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 4:12 PM, 'Pascal Jasmin' via Programming <programm...@jsoftware.com> wrote: > The only disadvantage I recognize is the point about special code. It would be interesting to go over the reasons you do not recognize the other disadvantages. > As to your other points, because the primitives are tacit, I believe there is > integrated rank support. > > floor b. 0 > 0 _ _ You might want to read http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/1998-October/000041.html All verbs have rank support, even verbs which contain explicit definitions. However, for some combinations of primitives, the interpreter takes special steps - bypassing the default implementation of rank support with something more efficient. > English is needed to read dictionary, and all of the primitives are the monad > dictionary entries, so everything is autodocumented. In my experience, documentation is difficult and autodocumentation quickly falls victim to entropy. It sounds great, but most examples I have seen become incredibly useless in practice. It's possible to work around this with manual effort, but the effort involved often seems to be greater than the effort of simply doing it manually in the first place. Where automation shines is replicating the useful manual efforts. > The advantage bigger than the one you mentioned is better seeing the intent > of code. Agreed. Thanks, -- 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
