Jose Mario Quintana wrote: > The reason why we always program tacitly and we generate implementation > function-level code in my company is that I find easier to do it this way.
Once I switched to J and discovered tacit programming I used nothing else, but then I was only teaching. Nevertheless I wrote lots of scripts, for example to deliver drill and practice to students, all entirely tacit, all with great pleasure. And I taught only tacit. > My turning point occurred shortly after I realized that there is always a > way to program any verb tacitly, in other words, J tacit programming is > Turing complete (see > http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/general/1999-December/002736.html ). And I wrote an interactive von Neumann IAS simulator (complete with an assembler) entirely tacit. But my turning point came when I started to write a book aimed at introducing tacit J to the great unwashed public, when I discovered I couldn't write my own operations tacitly. The first and simplest was stk =: 1 '] ,: u.' (this was back in J3 days). There were quite a few others. I asked on this Forum how to do it tacitly but nobody could tell me. Can you ? I then argued for x. y. u. v. to be sequestered as primitive symbols so that I could explicate operands. And this seems to me to be an even more reasonable request once "function-level programming" is acknowledged because the joy is to be free of arguments and their names, but it seems reasonable to be able to refer to operands at the function level. But my request was given short shrift. If I can be told how to code operations like stk tacitly (i.e., without all that notational encumbrance) then I would like to resume writing my book. I had an agreement with Wiley for it, and they have already published my "Computers and People" (which mentions J on p.60). Neville Holmes, P.O.Box 404, Mowbray 7248, Tasmania Normal e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send instant messages to your online friends http://au.messenger.yahoo.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
