I agree with Devon. The pain/gain ratio here is not encouraging. On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:20 AM Devon McCormick <[email protected]> wrote:
> This idea sounds like it would be a minor gain balanced against a lot of > serious problems. > > On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 11:14 AM Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > > > 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. > > > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > > 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 > > > > > -- > > Devon McCormick, CFA > > Quantitative Consultant > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- John D. Baker [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
