Hello again!
I've run into another "stumper" (for me, at least). True amending
(according to the Vocabulary) does not work for boxed data, and the
examples under "AmendingBoxedStructures" do not seem to be the kind of
solution I'm looking for.
What I'm trying to do is something that any human can rather easily
do, but which I'm finding very challenging to program in J. Below is
a brief example of my issue with row E. There are many rows above E
and many rows below E. (Sorry for the "A", but it was the closest
that I could get to a similarly sized inverted "V".) All of the rows
can actually have hundreds or thousands of column values, rather than
just the 5 column values illustrated here. The row number for row E
is known, as would be the number of boxed values in that row (there
may be empty column values at the end of rows). E's kind of row is
repeated ever so often in the actual table I'm working with, but the
number of values could vary somewhat from one of these rows to another
(that is, it is NOT a constant value, but that probably makes no
difference whatsoever for the solution of this problem--I just want to
alert you that you cannot count on a fixed value for all row lengths
in terms of quantity--some rows may have empty values at the end).
Just an assumption caution: the table contains *both* numeric and
literal data, NOT numeric data only.
A
|
| aa | aa | aa | aa | aa |
| 22 | 53 | 32 | 28 | 36 | <--- row E
| cc | cc | cc | cc | cc |
|
V
Here's the problem: I want to subtract a constant value (say, 12) from
each of the boxed values, so that row E will look like this:
| 10 | 41 | 20 | 16 | 24 |
The same principle would apply to all other similar rows, only each
such row would have a different constant to subtract from all of the
boxed values in the row.
If each of these rows existed by themselves, I know how to do what I
want. However, I cannot figure out how to do it in the middle of a
table of boxed values, where the data comes from external sources and
where the lengths of rows can vary. (The data in row E is
astronomical data which is not strictly regular due to elliptical
orbits rather than circular orbits, which is what leads to variations
in speed.)
The program I have written so far is what I thought was the more
difficult part, and I thought the constant subtraction from values
would be the easy part. However, it has proved to be the opposite
because I'm stumped by this.
I appreciate any help that you can give (I'm always learning new stuff
in J!). The only thing I ask is that you please use EXPLICIT code and
*not* tacit code. Thanks in advance!
Harvey
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