... or even <> a la APL!?
Mike

Sent from my iPad

> On 27 Jul 2021, at 02:18, Henry Rich <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I don't see much downside to implementing a sentence delimiter, except for a 
> nagging feeling that the good Lord left that space for you to put commentary 
> in.
> 
> Take a moment to consider what is the best delimiter.  I prefer >:: to .. or 
> ... because it shows the left-to-right order.
> 
> Henry Rich
> 
>> On 7/26/2021 10:44 AM, 'Michael Day' via Programming wrote:
>> APL lives/d with the diamond separator,  which works from left to right,  in 
>> addition to
>> left tack and right tack (in Dyalog anyway) which are similar to J's [  and  
>> ]  .
>> 
>> So this modification might help recruit any APL-ers still averse to or 
>> unaware of J.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Mike
>> 
>>> On 26/07/2021 14:47, Eric Iverson wrote:
>>> Michal,
>>> I slightly favor having a statement separator. Others are violently
>>> opposed. You have started an interesting discussion that might take a while
>>> to pick up steam. Don't give up yet!
>>> 
>>> There are some complicating issues, such as debug.
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Jul 26, 2021 at 4:57 AM Michal Wallace <[email protected]>
>>> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Come on... :) Obviously I know how to write the code I wrote. :D
>>>> Yes, I can write the whole thing like this:
>>>> 
>>>> puts@']' fgc@9 puts 4 {. s=.1|.s [ fgc@15 puts@'[' goxy xy [ bgc 4 [ fgc 9
>>>> 
>>>> I'm just saying it looks backwards and awkward to me.
>>>> 
>>>> This thing draws a string on the screen that looks like [.oOo] in
>>>> various colors, and the .oOo part is extracted from a larger string
>>>> so it looks like a little indicator that the machine is still doing
>>>> something
>>>> or waiting for you to do something. (Or rather, this draws one frame of the
>>>> animation)
>>>> 
>>>> If I were putting that string together without setting the colors and
>>>> moving the cursor, i'd write:
>>>> 
>>>> echo '[', (s=.1|.s), ']'
>>>> 
>>>> But with the color and cursor stuff, I seem to have to break it into
>>>> multiple lines, or write it backwards.
>>>> 
>>>> In this particular case, what I plan to do instead is write a little
>>>> language that lets me set colors
>>>> and move the cursor in the natural order, so it's not a big deal... (Maybe
>>>> for J, i'll just make a
>>>> "left-to-right" verb that operates on gerunds or something...)
>>>> 
>>>> But... lately, I've also been working on some parser combinators, and a
>>>> small virtual machine.
>>>> In all these cases, I have bits and pieces of the code which are more
>>>> naturally expressed as
>>>> sequences of imperative operations, rather than function compositions, and
>>>> I find myself
>>>> wanting this same statement separator.
>>>> 
>>>> I use K every day at work, and it uses the semicolon for this purpose. I
>>>> often find myself wishing K
>>>> had forks, and J had statement separators. (and native dictionaries, and a
>>>> literal syntax for symbols.. :))
>>>> 
>>>> Anyway, I noticed '..' was free now and it seems to have a nice symmetry
>>>> with '{{' and '}}'
>>>> and I thought it might be a good notation for this.
>>>> 
>>>> I don't really expect this proposal to make it into the language (for one
>>>> thing, it's not clear to me that
>>>> there's an actual process by which language decisions get made), but... I
>>>> also didn't expect we'd
>>>> ever get anything like {{ and }} (which I've also wanted forever), so I'm
>>>> asking.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Sun, Jul 25, 2021 at 9:45 PM 'robert therriault' via Programming <
>>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Hi Michal,
>>>>> 
>>>>> In your first line you are already doing what I would do, which is to use
>>>>> [ to separate the different results.
>>>>> 
>>>>> goxy xy [ bgc 4 [ fgc 9
>>>>> 
>>>>> You can continue to do that as long as you get the order right and lower
>>>>> things vertically would precede the upper ones
>>>>> 
>>>>> fgc 15 [ puts '[' [ goxy xy [ bgc 4 [ fgc 9
>>>>> 
>>>>> or perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are trying to do.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Cheers, bob
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Jul 25, 2021, at 17:00, Michal Wallace <[email protected]>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>>> I love the new '{{' and '}}' ...
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> what are the chances we could bring '..' back as a statement separator,
>>>>> at
>>>>>> least inside these new double curly braces?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Often I have a bunch of really short lines that I would love to just
>>>>> stick
>>>>>> on one line, like this demo code from the terminal library I'm working
>>>>> on:
>>>>>>   while. -. keyp'' do.
>>>>>>     goxy xy [ bgc 4 [ fgc 9
>>>>>>     puts '['
>>>>>>     fgc 15
>>>>>>     puts 4{. s=.1|.s
>>>>>>     fgc 9
>>>>>>     puts']'
>>>>>>     sleep 150
>>>>>>   end.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I can easily stick these on one line with @ or [: but the code winds up
>>>>>> feeling very backward, so I find myself just using newlines and
>>>> wasting a
>>>>>> lot of vertical space on my screen.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> One answer here is to make a mini-language for terminal operations
>>>> that I
>>>>>> can just pass as a string, but there are other places where I find
>>>> myself
>>>>>> wishing I could just write a sequence of expressions (evaluated
>>>>>> right-to-left as usual) but all on one line, and sequence them from
>>>> left
>>>>> to
>>>>>> right... (I use K at work, and this is a pretty natural style)
>>>>>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
>>>>>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>>>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>>>>> 
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>>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
>> 
>> 
> 
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