there is nothing wrong with saying something like
plus =: +
conjugate =:+
and knowing that plus is intended to be monadic (although +(real
number) is the real number in either case. If you want one to work as
monadic onlyand the other as dyadic only-then you have to dress them up
a bit with some test and error message.
you can do mean=: sum divideby count in any language.
J has 2 meanings for + -which are dependent on the context. English
also is like that
in that some words have two unrelated meanings (e.g bow , can, twig,
butt ) as well as having some with related meanings (e.g rise, level)
and a lot of other things that depend on context
It would be possible to build up a long list of names so that all uses
of the primitives have different names and do just what the names
indicate but is that of any more than limited use?
On 11/27/2015 1:08 PM, 'Pascal Jasmin' via Programming wrote:
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,
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