"
In J dictionary, only tie conjunction
on verbs was mentioned to produce a gerund.
"
I am afraid you might not be the only one who has reached such conclusion.
Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is a misconception that a gerund can only
be a list (of atomic representations) of verbs. Why? See [0] in the
context of [1].
[0] Atomic
http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dx005.htm#1
[1] [Jprogramming] how to test for a gerund Roger Hui
http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/programming/2010-April/019178.html
Mind you gerundYN is not bulletproof.
On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 5:46 AM, bill lam <bbill....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am thinking of the opposite. In J dictionary, only tie conjunction
> on verbs was mentioned to produce a gerund. Boxed verbs had not been
> mentioned. Atomic representation of boxed verbs looks like that of
> gerund and therefore can work as gerund. IMO this is a backdoor
> provided by J implementation.
>
> Metadata could be attached to "real" gerunds that have ancestors which
> were results of verb`verb. All other nouns without this DNA would be
> regarded as non-gerund.
>
> Just my 2 cents.
>
> On Thu, Aug 3, 2017 at 3:57 PM, Marshall Lochbaum <mwlochb...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Can I just point out that it's not too late to add some (documented) way
> > to box verbs/adverbs/conjunctions? These could be treated as gerunds by
> > everything that currently uses gerunds, and the interpreter can just
> > throw an error if anything attempts to actually unbox them. They are
> > much harder to confuse than the current gerunds, and will have far
> > better performance.
> >
> > This sounds like a radical divergence from the way J works now, but I
> > don't think it is in practice. Programmers would use some new
> > conjunction to replace (`), and provided they don't inspect the
> > structure of gerunds nothing else changes. I suppose there would need to
> > be a way to check what class of object a box contains, because unboxing
> > to check the type is not allowed. Gerunds would remain useful for
> > programmers who want to inspect functions or build them from scratch,
> > but would otherwise become obselete.
> >
> > Marshall
> >
>
>
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