That's good advice, but not for raw beginners. You know your audience.
Henry Rich
On 8/27/2019 12:46 PM, Arnab Chakraborty wrote:
Dear all,
Thanks for the comments. I shall update the tutorial accordingly. My love
for =. stems from an advice that I got from a C instructor: Always declare
variables in the smallest scope possible.
Of course, I am not supposed to mix C philosophy with J philosophy...
Thanks and regards,
Arnab
On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 9:18 PM Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote:
Teaching raw beginners, I found it much easier to use =: everywhere.
When the time comes the savvy ones will see the value in =. .
Henry Rich
On 8/26/2019 11:44 AM, Raul Miller wrote:
I have a couple comments.
Well.. ok, there are a variety of alternate phrasings of these
concepts. But those tie back to the exposition, so I'm going to be
ignoring them here.
That said:
1) For this audience (j newcomers) I would be strongly tempted to use
dyad define instead of 4 : 0. (Specifically, the names 'adverb',
'conjunction', 'verb' or 'monad', and 'dyad' instead of the numbers 1,
2, 3 and/or 4 because I think the words show intent better. Also, I
would be tempted to use the words 'define' and 'def' instead of their
definitions.)
2) I would use =: for all stand-alone definitions. This is because =.
definitions in a script vanish when you attempt to reference them
outside of the script, and when teaching novices that's a likely
stumbling block, and one that's difficult to ask about. ("Why doesn't
it work?") But I would also use =. consistently inside defined blocks
(unless I specifically was debugging) -- if I wanted to define a word
which was useful outside that block, I'd move the definition out of
the block and switch it back to a =: definition. Your word 'newline'
might be an example of what I'd move outside the block.
Then again, copy and paste inclinations suggest that maybe I should
use =: consistently everywhere? .. I'm not sure...
Anyways, I think your basic approach here is solid. Specifically,
you're relying on domain knowledge outside the language, and choosing
J phrasing which roughly fit that approach.
Thanks,
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