Dear Mr. Stone:
I am increasingly seeing the word "orthogonal" used in various computer forums.
Looking up the word in various online dictionaries does not help, as there are
usually several definitions. What do you mean here by "orthogonal"? Thank you.
-----Original Message-----
From: Programming <programming-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com> On Behalf Of
Elijah Stone
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2023 7:24 PM
To: programm...@jsoftware.com
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Jprogramming] Closures; WAS: Verbs returning verbs
(To be clear, closures are orthogonal, from a language perspective, to
syntactically first-class functions. But they often appear together, and I
think the former more important, which is why I took the opportunity to bring
it up.)
On Tue, 17 Jan 2023, Henry Rich wrote:
> I don't follow any of this thread, because I don't understand what is
> missing from standard J. I find J adequate for everything I want to
> do. What am I missing?
>
> I can see that if you want to write all-tacit code you have trouble if
> you need to feed a verb result into a modifier.
>
> Suppose though that I am content with writing explicit definitions.
> What do I need beyond the standard language, and for what use case?
>
> Henry Rich
>
> On 1/17/2023 9:23 PM, Elijah Stone wrote:
>> (Curried modifiers, as you say, are a solution, but, again, another
>> half-solution.)
>>
>> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023, Raul Miller wrote:
>>
>>> Here, I suspect that you're only getting noun values in your closure
>>> -- you'll have to sprinkle those noun references with something like
>>> `:6 if you want anything else. That's probably not a huge problem.
>>>
>>> But, thinking about this, personally I'm not seeing a lot of
>>> motivation for this approach, either. (What problems would this solve?
>>> I'm sure there are some great motivating examples out there. And
>>> closures certainly have a lot of popularity. But... position in a
>>> list can be thought of as being conceptually analogous to a
>>> variable, so it should be apparent that we already have some support
>>> for the algorithmic role of closures.)
>>>
>>> (I should perhaps also note, here, that conjunctions and adverbs
>>> which have verb results are self-currying.)
>>>
>>> Anyways... I'm not thinking particularly deep thoughts here -- I'm
>>> just reflexively reaching for motivating examples (which might
>>> assist in forming some of those sorts of thoughts).
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> --
>>> Raul
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 7:01 PM Elijah Stone <elro...@elronnd.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I suggest:
>>>>
>>>> [x] u &:: (k;v;k;v...) y
>>>>
>>>> Will evaluate u with bindings kvkv... (raveled) active. Should work
>>>> for both explicit and tacit. Implementation is allowed to
>>>> coalesce; e.g., u
>>>> &:: (k;v)
>>>> &:: (k;v) `'' may be rendered u &:: (k;v;k;v), deduplicated, &c.
>>>> Substitution also ok; eg (f%#) &:: ('f';+/`'') becomes +/%#.
>>>>
>>>> I would like for verbs defined inside of explicit verbs to be
>>>> implicitly closed; this is obviously a compat break, but.
>>>>
>>>> On Tue, 17 Jan 2023, Elijah Stone wrote:
>>>>
>>>> > 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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