Agreed with the group here on the seminal choice already made by J's
designers
(as well as APL's) (eye-wink). Until/unless several thing hapen, I would
ay leave well eough alone:
1) Declarable/definable sybtactic bindng priorities.
2) Extensible multi-token functor syntax (that is allow dual/multipart
synta, such as declarng a paired functor that syntacticallt works like
parentheses that you can bind to any meaning at all).
Not traiditionally availalbe, although it has been around since Michigan
MADCAP, and came close in ALgol68 overloading for the same type of single
token functors and fixed rhune grouping syntax to _form_ these operators,
similar to J.
J's simplicity and generality in thi area should NOT be changed unless a
quantum improvement can be made: not easy to do, if at all possible while
maintaining compatibility.
Very difficult.
I will disagree with _one_ phrasing here: I no longer find it surprising
that J has such expressive claity and fleixbility.
Rather, I _expect_ it.
The _only_ reason that any criticisms I make that happen to be correct ((if
any, judge for yourself)) canb so simply and immediately expressed is easy
to see:
The clutter has already been cleared aay and organized by _experts_.
((Which does not mean that they in turn do not miss the boat entirely from
time to time; or in turn that they of the _previous_ generation may not miss
the _next_ sea change;
... but I would not bet against them on that topic in the interim...
))
Rather, I _hope_ that what I am saying woud be analyzed fro the point of
view of 3 decaes experience in such topics, expressed in brifef form
(roughly equivalent to management by exxception);
with the (naive on my part) expectation that a conversational thread will be
made and maintained over several months to yars of time on the same topic.
I would recommend taking _anyone's_ comments in similar mode ((See Qabalism:
just perchance every communication carries an element of the truth
((whatever that actually _is_))
that evryone else will fail to perceive until they "get" what the
correspondent is _saying_. ESPECIALLY those that seem most contrary to
current J philosophy.
Not easy to put the pieces together; which is why I have such I high opine
of Dr. KEI: He developed a high skill level in indirectly leading
discussions back to first priniciples by means of kvetches on the side that
did not, at first glance or read, always appea to be relevant to the topical
thread under discussion. A very difficult skjill to realize.
On 3/21/06, Bill Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
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> p j <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> > What would you expect the programmer intended in the
> > following?
> > 4*3 + 2*3 -1
> >
> > Almost everyone would say: 12 + 6 - 1
>
> 'cept here. :-)
>
> > There's a way to unambiguously use whitespace to alter
> > binding precedence such that code is clearer to read,
> > and significantly faster to write and edit if you
> > consider the cursor movement and shift keys necessary
> > to add parentheses.
>
> > This would be very sweet sugar, and hope you consider
> > it. Let me know of any issues you find with the
> > approach.
>
> PJ,
>
> I'm uncertain whether to write this or not, for I generally have a very
> favorable attitude towards ideas for improving things. I'm repeating
> something I've written before; if there were a good spot for such on the
> Wiki, I'd write it there once and let people add to and modify it. If
> anyone has suggestions, I can start something when I get a few moments.
>
> Like you, I found things I thought were missing in the language and
> spent some not-so-fruitful time wrestling with the ideas years ago.
> When I found I wasn't making much progress in writing my first real J
> program, I stopped and regrouped.
>
> What I learned is that J is most like a language in the natural language
> sense. Or, better said, I (and others, I think, by observation here)
> learn J best by treating it as if it were another natural language:
> German, French, Chinese, Tagalong, .... Not being Mark Twain, when I
> first started learning German, I didn't complain and suggest Germans
> should really put all of their verbs together near the front of a
> sentence, because it was so hard to remember what you were talking about
> by the time you got to the end of the sentence and found the remaining
> verb fragments. I buckled down, tried to think like a German, and
> finally began to catch on. Eventually I began to find beauty in that
> language as expressed by Goethe and others, much as I had found and
> still find beauty in the English language as expressed by many of our
> best writers. I also discovered that certain things ended up being
> easier for me to express in German than in English. That was partially
> because I learned those ideas while living, thinking, and talking in
> German and partially because the denotations and connotations in German
> may lend themselves to certain things more closely that English (and
> vice versa). The same would be true of other languages; these just
> happens to be the two I know best.
>
> Here's where I pause and think. What I'm about to say sounds a bit like
> "shut up and do it my way" thinking, and I'm really not like that, at
> least in most areas. What I've learned is that learning J seems best
> done by those who don't start looking to mold it to fit their current
> worldview but by those who abandon (temporarily) their worldview to grok
> what J is and what it offers. At the end of the day, the really good J
> writers seem able to write elegant, expressive J, and many of them, I
> presume, can also write good C or C++ or Python or .... They seem to
> use them as they see fit -- sometimes selecting the best for the task at
> hand and perhaps sometimes selecting more what they feel like using on
> that day.
>
> Up front, it's tempting to suggest blending the best of all worlds,
> except that J continues to surprise in how expressive it is, and
> blending it with other constructs, if not done exceedingly thoughtfully,
> risks diluting that expressiveness. I'm not sure how to achieve
> thoughtful consideration of such ideas, for much of the expressiveness
> of J (like much of the expressiveness of English or German or Chinese)
> continues to be unfolded as I (we?) read what other elegant writers have
> written. I'm re-reading works by various J authors right now (Ken's
> Math for the Layman and J.E.H. Shaw's Warwick Guide to J) and
> discovering idioms I didn't know or remember.
>
> To serve as a calibration point, I'm the stick-in-the-mud who didn't
> even favor x and y (over x. and y.), and I have been bitten by that
> change once already. :-)
>
> PJ, I welcome your thoughtfulness to this group. I'd just encourage you
> to expend it on grokking J, as crazy as it may sometimes seem, rather
> than on ways to change J. Certainly J is a living language, but I think
> it works best if its changes are made slowly, thoughtfully, and out of a
> fundamental understanding of the essence of J, making it more J-like.
> Some of my essay here is about protecting the J I like; more of it, I
> think, is about helping you and others make the maximum use of J, and
> the path of changing J to fit existing ideas has rarely seemed to work
> with J.
>
> Does that help?
>
> Bill
> - --
> Bill Harris http://facilitatedsystems.com/weblog/
> Facilitated Systems Everett, WA 98208 USA
> http://facilitatedsystems.com/ phone: +1 425 337-5541
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