Philip - I'm not familiar with the package facility but, looking at it, it looks like it's geared to pack together a bunch of things from the workspace. The WS code puts individual variables in separate files.
I'm using this code now for work on the Netflix Prize as a substitute for a database because the data takes up a lot of space. I write out my large datasets to files as sequentially numbered variables. This allows me to work with sufficiently small pieces to avoid paging. Also, I have an adverb defined to apply any function I want to any set of these sequential variables. I also use this facility when I'm working in J under an emacs session but I want to plot something: I ship the variable over to a standard session to do this. Hopefully this will no longer be necessary once the jee.exe bug (pasting a function definition into the J session locks it up) gets fixed. In general, I find it useful any time I've put a lot of work into some data and want to save it "as is". Devon On 6/27/07, Philip A. Viton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Devon McCormick recently posed to the wiki a script which will allow you to save your variables into an apl-workspace-like file which can then be loaded and the variables defined. I like the idea, and I haven't studied Devon's code carefully, but I have two questions: how does this differ from, and why is it better than, the package facility included in J? Using that, one could save all nouns by pack nl 0 then save them to a disk file (using jfiles functions). Then read them in and use pdef to re-establish them. Similarly for verbs, etc. ------------------------ Philip A. Viton City Planning, Ohio State University 275 West Woodruff Avenue, Columbus OH 43210 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
-- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
