I don't love the proposal, as I think a conception of verbs as first class
should involve _less_ hackery with representations, not more. But I don't
feel that strongly either way.
More fruitful, IMO, would be to work out how to add closures, as I think there
is a more urgent need for that (u./v. is a band-aid). Perhaps taking
inspiration from kernel (but skipping the mutation!).
On Mon, 16 Jan 2023, Henry Rich wrote:
I have never understood the zeal for having verbs return verbs, but it
must be real if some are willing to use dangerous backdoor hacks into JE
to achieve it. ARs make it possible to pass verbs around, but executing
them requires dropping into explicit code. To remedy this, I offer a
proposal, backward compatible with older J:
1. (". y) and Apply (x 128!:2 y) to be modified so that if the result of
execution is not a noun, it is replaced by its AR (instead of '' as
previously).
2. (". y) and Apply to be modified so that if y (for ".) or x (for
Apply) is boxed, the sentence is executed as usual except that each box
is converted using (box 5!:0) before being put onto the execution stack.
The idea is that you can execute (".
expr-producing-AR,exp-producing-AR,...) without having to get any
modifiers involved.
Sentence execution can produce ARs, and can take ARs created by verbs to
represent verbs and modifiers. That sounds pretty classy to me, but I
don't know whether it's first-class.
Henry Rich
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