R.E. Boss: I've posted problems on this Forum multiple times, and several of those times you've responded with answers which were substantially the same as others', or indeed, the spec or first-pass answer I myself included with the original message.
Do I accuse you of plagiary? No. At worst, I believe you didn't grok the solutions posted before your own. But my usual assumption is that you, like me, don't read the other solutions first; you treat the problem like a puzzle, where reading the other solutions before creating your own would ruin the fun. J is not Perl*. We have a concise language with a small community (which includes the implementer of the language) that shares, to a large extent, a mindset/approach to problem solving. A lot of that community has decades of experience with a similar language. Patterns have arisen, idioms identified. This has led not to TMTOWTDI, but to TAAFWTDIAMOTAO: There are a few ways to do it, and most of them are obvious. Take this case as an example: Do you not recognize that "your" solution is really Jose's, but with (A) The onus to box the items of the LHA removed from the user (which is not always desirable) and (B) a \. added so that intermediate results are provided? Here's the version he provided for J5 (as opposed to the modified J4 version I use): jose =. 1 :' >@:( u&.>/ @:( |. @:[ , < @: ]))' here's your solution expressed as an adverb: boss =. 1 :'[: > [: u&.>/\.&. |. <@] , <"[EMAIL PROTECTED] ' You appear to prefer [: f g over f@:g and reducing f@:g to [EMAIL PROTECTED] for infinite rank g . Let's apply those isomorphic (semantics-retaining) transformations to his solution: jose =. 1 :'[: > [: u&.>/ |. @[ , < @] ' Your solution is suspiciously similar to his. And Jose posted his solution 5 years ago (which solution, according to him, was inspired by an entry in the Dictionary written years before that). Are you a plagiarist? Or perhaps you believe \.&.|. particularly clever? Andrew Nitikin studied it in 1998: http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/1998-November/000299.html And it's been mentioned many times since (and perhaps prior -- comp.lang.apl is hard to search effectively with Google groups). And, as he points out, it's in the Phrases. What I post to the Forum, I give freely. I relinquish all copyright; it's in the public domain. Yes, it's nice to see my name written out in others' messages (hence my appreciation of Fraser's "thank you"), but that's icing, not cake. Because I've adopted this philosophy, I tend to assume others have as well. Arguably, that's a mistake; but I'm willing to bet others on the Forum commit it. So, my suggestion is, if you want credit for a particularly piece of work, you ask for it explicitly. -Dan * J isn't Wikipedia either, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Assume_good_faith ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
