On 3/28/06, Henry Rich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I am working on a one-sheet reference card for J. It looks like it will fit
> on front & back of an 8.5x11 sheet if I use an 8-point font. I have a first
> pass at what I want to include, attached to this email as a text file. I
> would like comments from interested users before I go through the pain of
> cramming it onto a page.
I found this to be very promising and something I would definitely
print, laminate and use regularly.
Will the final result be a neatly formatted .pdf file? I think that is
almost mandatory in order to optimize readability, even though editing
.pdfs are of course difficult.
What I would find most useful is a sort of "vocabulary with examples".
Thus, I'd structure it in one ore more tables as follows:
<verb or concept> ; <explanation> ; <example>
Such as:
+ ; Plus ; 2 + 8 -> 10
<: ; Decrement ; <: 5 7 -> 4 6
The ";" is a placeholder for cells in the table, so that the columns
line up nicely. The "->" is there to distinguish between the "program"
and the result. Please use whatever symbol is "standard" for J.
(Usually, of course, the result goes on a new line, but because of
space constraints, that is not appropriate here.)
Sometimes you use "y" in the examples and sometimes numbers. I prefer
numbers, but in either case consistency would be better, I think.
The examples in your file are much simpler than the ones in the
vocabulary. I think that is very good. The vocabulary often crams too
many concepts together in one concise example which I find difficult
to interpret.
Or rather, if there was such a reference card, I'd use it 90% of the
time. For the final 10%, the examples in the vocabulary are fine,
because then I wanted to dive deeper into a subject.
> The intended user has a reading knowledge of J but may need some reminding
> about what the primitives do. My goal is to include one example of all the
> important idioms of J so that the interested user can look it up in more
> detail
> if he finds it promising.
This is very good. I think that it is then important to use the name
of the verbs as the next step is usually to look up the verbs in the
vocabulary, when needed.
In some cases where idioms are presented ("<\"), the explanation
should be set in a different way from a "regular verb" to indicate
immediately that it is a derivative of some form.
> I don't really expect anyone to review the attached notes in detail, but
> if y'all would think a minute about what features you have found yourself
> forgetting, or some feature you didn't find out about for years but now love,
> let me know if you don't find it listed. I say nothing about useful verbs
> from the J scripts and I welcome suggestions about what to mention.
As others have mentioned, I would like a graphical representation of
trains, hooks, forks etc. This is too complicated to describe, but the
pictures are enough to jog my memory about what to use.
A few of the examples are just too complex for me to parse. An example is:
([stepsize,:]shape) u;._3 y operates on regions of y with the given
shape, starting at all possible multiples of items of stepsize.
Negative items in shape run that index backwards
Without an example it's just too difficult for me to figure out if
this is what I want. I understand that since any reasonable example
would have a multidimensional answer, presenting it may too space
consuming. Then just skip it, IMHO.
/Micke
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