> On Dec 3, 2017, at 10:40 AM, Andrew Dabrowski <[email protected]> wrote: > > 2. Is anyone bothered by the lack of a built-in associative list structure?
There have been a few times so far that I have thought I needed this, but so far I have found another approach that works better. In one case, I instead just kept separate arrays for keys and values. I still think in a record-oriented way, but I think column-oriented suits J better; if the types are compatible, one array for keys and then a matrix of values. After all, if I do the calculation with one value, it will probably extrapolate nicely to the whole sequence of values and suddenly the whole calculation is done. In another case I needed to use the key as an enum, to choose between different computations, but instead I turned the keys into integer values and applied a gerund. These two approaches won't suffice for processing JSON, but so far it seems to be the case that where we have one thing in the past, J has three or four, and I've only seen two so far. It's similar going from assembly to structured programming though, where jumps turn into while/for/foreach/do-while. -- Daniel Lyons ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
