On 11/27/2017 01:00 PM, Daniel Lyons wrote:
I’m sure after we master J, having to program without rank is going to make all
other programming languages seem like much bigger kludges.
Perhaps, but rank seems to be one aspect of J that other languages have
avoided. APL/J have been very influential, rank may have been a dead
end. I saw somewhere that rank issues get so intractable that people
publish journal articles about what is possible with. K seems to have
taken a different and more successful route.
Mathematica also has a way of specifying at what level a function should
be applied, but specification is relative to the top of the array rather
than the bottom, and that seems to work better.
And I think you’re taking this one thing rather more seriously than is
strictly necessary; even in languages that permit me, I almost never wind up
with nullary functions. I bet if you check, you’ll see they’re uncommon in your
code too. There’s usually something I want to calculate with… but then again, I
have written thousands of lines of Haskell that actually do useful things.
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