Ok... (deep breath)... Here is something that the dictionary says:
"In English, a gerund is a noun that carries the force of a verb, as does the noun cooking in the art of cooking. The tie applies to two verbs to produce a gerund. Gerunds are commonly used with Insert (/) and with Agenda (@.): "More generally, tie produces gerunds as follows: u`v is au,av , where au and av are the (boxed noun) atomic representations (5!:1) of u and v . Moreover, m`n is m,n and m`v is m,av and u`n isau,n . See Bernecky and Hui [12]. Gerunds may also be produced directly by boxing. ..." -- http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/d610.htm And then it goes on with some examples. This suggests that any value that has an atomic representation could be a valid part of a gerund. The syntax of the tie conjunction only accepts nouns and verbs, but gerunds are an array and we use gerunds to represent the components of gerunds (where they have structure). For example, the gerund for +&3 includes the atomic representation of & You could introduce rules which eliminate some atomic representations, but that would create problems in the code which implements gerunds (because now you need to introduce some other mechanism to handle those cases). That said, the actual implementation is instead: "... tie produces gerunds as follows: u`v is au,av , where au and av are the (boxed noun) atomic representations (5!:1) of u and v where u and v are verbs. Tie does not use the atomic representation of u where u is a noun, as u would often be a gerund." (The current implementation also doesn't use the atomic representation of v, when v is a noun. But this could be considered an implementation flaw. So I left that detail out of my representation of the current implementation.) That said, it would be simple to change the implementation so that it is consistent with the current dictionary writeup: Have the parser track what the previous operation was. If the previous operation was tie, tie would not use the ar of u. If the previous operation was anything else, tie would use the ar of u. (Note that this works specifically because of J's syntax rules for conjunctions.) This would be a breaking change. For example, the result of 1`2`3 would be different. This would also mean that (a`b)`c would produce a different result from a`b`c (This would also mean that if you want to build up a long gerund across multiple sentences, you'll need to to use append (,) instead of tie to join the component gerunds together.) This kind of change would also warrant a writeup describing the issue (perhaps in the release notes). Thanks, -- Raul On Tue, Sep 4, 2018 at 11:24 AM Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote: > > As I recall, Ye Dic says that gerunds are created by the tie > conjunction, and ipso facto are verbs or nouns. Every mention of the > use of a gerund implicitly assumes that an evoked atom of a gerund is a > verb. > > m in [email protected] and n in u^:n, if gerunds, are the same type as far as I am > concerned. I don't understand your last sentence (specifically what you > mean by 'array type', which to me is > literal/boolean.../verb/adverb/conjunction; and what 'positions of a > parsed verb' are). > > Henry Rich > > On 9/4/2018 10:31 AM, Raul Miller wrote: > > Can you be more specific? > > > > I don’t remember the dictionary making this assertion. > > > > I am also wondering why you would want a different concept of gerund for @. > > and ^: (or, generally speaking, why you would want a different array type > > for different positions in a parsed verb). > > > > Thanks, > > > > — > > Raul > > > > On Tuesday, September 4, 2018, Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote: > > > >> That's not Dictionary behavior, though. It shouldn't. > >> > >> Henry Rich > >> > >> On 9/4/2018 9:42 AM, Raul Miller wrote: > >> > >>> @. also accepts the ARs of non-verbs. > >>> > >>> For example: > >>> > >>> V=:p:i.9 > >>> (+/%#)`(<(,'0');V)@.0 V > >>> 11.1111 > >>> > >>> Thanks, > >>> > >>> > >> --- > >> This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. > >> https://www.avg.com > >> > >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
