> In particular, could one make the > workspace-interchange-file format work > with J?
J's eschews binary formats by design. So, unless you need ongoing communication between J and APL+Win, the best course would be, IMO, to calcuate your data from primary sources. Whereever and however you acquired the information for the original APL components, recreate that logic in J. If that's not possible, then I would convert your data once and store it in files which J can read natively. That leaves you two options: ASCII script files, and binary jfiles. Now, unless your data is very large and takes a long time to "calculate" (i.e. build using verbs on literal and numeric constants 0 : 0 ), I would use straight ASCII script files. Script files are easier to manage: read, understand, change, share, and version. Their primary drawback is that they're hard to write. That is, given an arbitrary J noun, it is difficult to produce an ASCII representation that has the above advantages (in particular, the "easy to understand" advantage). To my mind, the 5!:5 representation of a complex J structure has no advantages over the 3!:1 representation. And it's not clear which is more future-proof (both the definitions of primitives and the internal representation of J nouns can and do change from one major version to the next). But, since you said your data has 3 > rank and 0 = L. the 5!:5 representation should be just fine, maybe with a little help from 0 : 0 . Having said all that: the workspace-interchange-file format is just that: a format. J is a Turing-complete programming language. Any format readable and writable by another TCPL (in this case, APL+Win) is readable and writable by J. All that's wanting is a couple of verbs. Perhaps, if you point us at the specification for the workspace-interchange-file format, we can help you write those verbs. -Dan PS: Another interesting data serialization format is YAML: http://yaml.org . It's standardized, unambiguous, and is a good complement to J. Whereas J is a wonderful notation for describing operations upon data, YAML is good for describing the data itself. It's one of my goals to write a decent YAML library in J. (I will break the spec a bit by extending YAML's prosaic constant notation to a subset of J's more expressive variety) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
