Thank you, Roger and Raul, for your replies.
On this topic of computational costs and resource efficiency, the following
sentence from Henry Rich's book seems worth adding to this conversational
record:
"The actual cell-at-a-time execution of [EMAIL PROTECTED] is different [from
u@:v]
in two ways: it is slower because the verb v must be
restarted for each cell; and if the temporary space required by u
or v
is large, cell-at-a-time execution uses less space because the temporary space
for each cell is freed before the next cell is processed."
A similar trade-off appears to apply with the integrated rank support of |.
(which was shown as taking about half-again more space than a pronoun
substitution for the same primary).
I'm not going to let efficiency concerns like this dominate my writing style at
this point, but it's good to improve my grasp of what's going on when such
choices come to the fore. My personal bias is to have all my code work like J
handles sorting, i.e. having the language implement a technique that fits the
context of the data. Patently, I'll not be able to put that little attention
to resource efficiencies as I move from study into software development, but I
do hope it remains a peripheral concern.
Tracy
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