On Mon, Jun 1, 2020 at 11:12 PM Hauke Rehr <[email protected]> wrote: > So I’ll keep writing the way I used to. > I doubt I will ever have the time > to have a look at J4. So I’ll likely > skip the learn and 'fugged' parts :) > > Thanks for pointing all this out. > > Still I wonder if > > * the explicit form is much easier to understand > > is kind of a self-enforcing matter: > if noone learns it, noone understands it > and noone uses it regularly > if it were ubiquitous, maybe more people > would bother learning it and it would get > much easier to understand
The operations were things like [. and ]. (which act like [ and ] except that they are conjunctions), and the ability to form conjunction trains. It seems simple enough, but most people don't know how to debug that sort of code. Basically, to make it work, you had to spend time learning the parsing rules -- https://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dicte.htm -- so that you could understand why and when you had to swap things left or right. And the benefit was that you could write code where you refer to verbs implicitly. Think about that for a moment -- the operations which were being performed were implicit (not visible to the reader). And, of course, what they were operating on was also implicit. How big of an audience do you think you could build, who thought that building meta mechanisms (with no mention of the verbs nor nouns) was easy to understand? How would you approach debugging such code? There's definitely a small crowd who think that that kind of thing is fun. And, there were a few things that you could write simply (using short phrases), but mostly the point of that approach was that it was not easy. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
