> If a programmer is restricted to the tacit language (why? - I dunno)
I am a tacit fan(atic) for several reasons. Here are just four: once
fixed, tacit entities mind their own business without interference either
way with other tacit entities or otherwise; maybe is no longer a
performance issue but, at least aesthetically, I find JTRAN ugly, and one
cannot code tacit JTRAN inadvertently; tacit entities, unorthodox entities
included, satisfy all my specific needs; and coding tacitly brings me joy.
"Every mind is a world."
> I haven't followed the proposals closely. All I know is that having a
> verb return a non-noun is going to create havoc inside JE.
Then, I am afraid, it is too late now for j to have officially genuine
first-class citizens. This not only affects the completeness of tacit
adverbial and conjunctional programming, but tacit verbal programming
despite being Turing complete (in principle) becomes is also abated versus
its explicit/hybrid counterpart. I am not really surprised, I do not know
of any implementor, past or present, of an array programming language who
has recommended coding tacit entities beyond short entities with the
exception of the implementor of Jelly which only allows coding tacitly.
On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 6:53 PM Henry Rich <henryhr...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Verbs are first-class in J, in that they can be passed as ARs or by name
> and invoked in an explicit verb. Nothing more is needed.
>
> If a programmer is restricted to the tacit language (why? - I dunno)
> verbs cannot be first-class. That seems to matter to some people. I
> was trying to give them something. I don't love the proposal either,
> but it seems pretty harmless.
>
> Any dangerous verb that attempts to return a non-noun is going to be
> crash-prone. What would DV"0 (6 6)$'+' mean? Its result is what type?
> what shape?
>
> I haven't followed the proposals closely. All I know is that having a
> verb return a non-noun is going to create havoc inside JE.
>
> Henry Rich
>
> On 1/17/2023 6:42 PM, 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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> >>
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