The x{a stuff sounds analogous to obverse, and would presumably be
used for parenthesized expressions to the immediate left of a modified
copula.
The downside, of course, would be lots of surprises and failure cases,
but that would give the few who learn them all a feeling of
accomplishment. (For example: in (x{a)+= y why should we update a and
not x?)
But, also, if the syntax becomes: pronounphrase(verb)copula thingy
another issue becomes: how do we know that verb was not really the
target of the assignment?
Anyways... what this really is is syntactic peer pressure. We should
expect a lot of that, so we probably need to learn how to identify
what each proposal would break.
Thanks,
--
Raul
On Sun, Nov 3, 2019 at 8:49 PM Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> I'd say that scratches the surface.
>
> First you would have to define something akin to a[x], which is not J
> syntax.
>
> Then you would have to decide what assignment to a[x] means when x has
> repeated indexes.
>
> Then you would have to decide what a[x] +=: y means when x has repeated
> indexes. Does it impose an order of operations? Do you insist that it
> work atom by atom, as if we were running on a 68000?
>
> What would a[x] +=: a[x] give?
>
> What about a[x] +=: a[a[x]] ? In what order are the updates to a to be
> made?
>
> I think you would end up leaving a large part of the spec undefined.
> That might be OK is the defined bit is very useful.
>
> hhr
>
>
>
>
> On 11/3/2019 8:08 PM, Raul Miller wrote:
> > Two tricks here:
> >
> > (1) Designing the altered parser table to handle this case (without
> > breaking existing code), and
> >
> > (2) implementing it.
> >
>
>
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