I think that primitives should try to handle as highly-ranked an array
they can. I find it much more simple and regular to explicitly lower the
rank of a verb than to recreate the high-rank version of the algorithm
myself.
I had a similar issue recently with #.: it is effectively a trailing-axis
reduction, and I wanted to reduce the leading axis, so I had to write
#.&.|:. I would much rather have written #., and used #."1 if I
explicitly wanted to reduce the last axis.
I do not know if this argument is strong or objective, but: in general, if
primitives have natively high rank, then lower-ranked versions can be
produced in a uniform manner; whereas if primitives are low-ranked, then
distinct high-ranked versions must be produced for each relevant
primitive.
-E
On Tue, 26 Oct 2021, Henry Rich wrote:
First: rank "_1 is shorthand for "_1"_ . Every verb must have
nonnegative rank.
Second: it seems to me that the current definition of I. is more
convenient for some things (where f@I. is used) and less for others
(where I.@, is used). Is there any strong objective argument one way or
the other?
Henry Rich
On 10/26/2021 1:56 AM, Elijah Stone wrote:
On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, Marshall Lochbaum wrote:
If I. combined the two, functions written with the high-rank version
would usually fail in this case. Better to make the programmer
remember an idiom than to provide an incomplete version of it.
No definition could be less amenable to high-rank computation than the
current one. And for code which does want to go that mile, "_1 is
much nicer (IMHO).
-E
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