Though I initially mis-interpreted this thread as an argument for a throwback to order-of-operation parsing, now that I better understand it, I remain unconvinced this proposal's usefulness outweighs its complication.
Consider that the original example would be better written in a more J-like fashion, without parens, like this: 1-~4 2+/ . * 3 3 (assuming the two "3"s only accidently have the same value and avoiding the special decrement function "<:" on the same assumption for "1".) It's hard to abstract from one simple, scalar, example like this to understand the advantage of changing the parsing order, especially one which places such heavy syntactic lifting on an invisible character. This reminds me of a lecture on C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup I attended a few years ago. I ran into a friend from the APL community there and we sat next to each other. Bjarne began talking about the advantages of overloading certain symbols. When he started showing examples where he was overloading the " " (space) operator, my friend and I both looked at each other in amusement as we simultaneously realized that the date was April 1st and Bjarne was having us on. But it's a little too early for that to be the case here. Devon On 3/23/06, p j <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I assume that was directed to me. > > Many of you will somehow ignore the next sentence, or > disbelieve my sincerity regarding it. I fully > understand the reason and practicality for right to > left parsing in J, and have no desire to change it. > > Having the ability to override the default parsing > order is an undisputed good thing. Working with > parens is usually a needlessly complicated way to > override that parsing order. The proposal is to allow > the programmer to use a single token ' ' in situations > that currently require 2 matching '()'. Its hoped > that the option makes code clearer and easier to read > write and edit. > ... -- Devon McCormick ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
