Bob wrote: > There was some discussion of Ian building a subset of J using Swift, as an investigation into the interface. Ed suggested that there would be howls of protest over which primitives had been selected if it were ever released.
I totally agree. I blench at the idea of ever releasing my own version of J, let alone a non-standard J lookalike. If such a pseudo-J engine ever comes into being, the jios user will never know it's there. Why I even contemplate the possibility is that jios makes hidden calls to the J Engine (JE) for system services, e.g. syntax coloring. But doing this risks gotchas – as jios users recently experienced with the last-but-one update. Replacing these hidden calls with native Swift code can be done in a lot of ways, only one of which entails emulating JE in whole or part. The last approach offers a short-cut – but may be more trouble than it's worth. The real issue is not whether to emulate a handful of JE primitives in Swift. It is whether to store/cache certain system tables (e.g. the contents of given sandboxed folders) inside the J session or as Swift data objects. Or both (?!!). Ian On Mon, 22 May 2023 at 19:42, Richard Donovan <rsdono...@hotmail.com> wrote: > Re item 2 - Rebranding > > The use of site:sitename is useful only if the sitename is known. > > If I wish to see (for example) all Project Euler problems solved using J > in any site the Google query “project Euler solution Jiver” would return J > (Jiver) solutions from all relevant websites. Similarly “use of jiver in > finance applications”, “matrix multiplication in Jiver compared to APL” etc > etc. At the moment such facilities are infuriatingly unavailable (as far as > I know). > > The use of Jiver as a name is illustrative but seems to be applicable. > Jiverlang would also be good but uses more characters! > > Just an idea! > > Richard Donovan > > > On 22 May 2023, at 02:41, 'robert therriault' via General < > gene...@jsoftware.com> wrote: > > > > == Report of Meeting 2023-05-18 == > > > > Present: John Baker, Ed Gottsman, Dave Lambert and Bob Therriault > > > > Full transcripts of this meeting are now available on the its wiki page. > https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki/Report_of_Meeting_2023-05-18 > > > > 1) Ed did not have an update on the J wiki as he is still reviewing the > session that Bob had with Stephen Therriault. Ed said he was looking > forward to having a session with Stephen in the future, as Ed feels that > Stephen has reservations that he would like to explore in search of > consensus on the J wiki viewer. > > > > 2) The second item was the rebranding of J as the J programming > language. John felt that there are not that many primary sources of J > information, but that using the term J Programming Language might seem > easier for Google searches. Ed wondered what the abbreviation might be and > felt that the folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory might have issues with > that. Ed asked what the motivation for the discussion was. It was agreed > that there are not that many sources of information about J, although many > people wish that there were more. Dave mentioned that using site: > jsoftware.com in a Google search was one way to limit the results of hits > and the wiki is also a good source of information. Ed said that Stack > Overflow has a <j> tag that is used. John mentioned that it might be a > good idea to have a wiki page that lists GitHub repos that have J. Bob > added that the new J Wiki Browser has a Bookmark button that allows you to > add and remove bookmarks of useful pages. > > > > 3) A further discussion of using "jios' for the iOS applicatons. This > was suggested by Ian Clark as Apple had pushed back on renaming the > versions by their version numbers. As it is, J701 is separate from J903, > but going forward the "jios" would be used for the umbrella name of the > J903 versions. There was some discussion of Ian building a subset of J > using Swift, as an investigation into the interface. Ed suggested that > there would be howls of protest over which primitives had been selected if > it were ever released. This lead to a discussion about whether the number > of primitives was an impediment to learning the language. Generally it was > felt that there are many languages that are much larger and that the number > of primitives should not be an issue. John wondered whether the definition > of a variable name in J might include unicode. Consensus was that there > would not be any problems with using "jios" as the application name. > > > > 4) As an extra item, John asked about the new modular arithmetic that > had been added. He felt it was useful for using clocks and other cyclical > calculations and had really speeded up with addition of the .gmp extended > functionality. Dave found it useful for Project Euler questions. > > > > 5) Fold was discussed as an operator that is written in J so was a bit > slower than what it would be if it were written in C. Fold was useful for a > number of reasons, not the least that it allows J to mirror other languages > which have different versions of Fold. J seems to have all the options > covered. > > > > 6) John asked about the new additions to the Sequential Machine. All > agreed that it can be difficult to program, but once programmed is quite > useful. The new additions may allow it to apply to a wider number of > applications. Dave mentioned that he had considered some type of an > interface to program the state machines. > > > > For access to previous meeting reports > https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Wiki_Development > > > > If you would like to participate in the development of the J wiki please > contact us on the general forum and we will get you an invitation to the > next J wiki meeting held on Thursdays at 23:00 (UTC) Next meeting is May > 25th, 2023. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
