> From: neville holmes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> I'm afraid I haven't made my purpose very clear to you. I was
> wanting to write, indeed I had partially written, a book to
> introduce tacit J to ordinary people with a mild or greater
> interest in numbers and no programming experience. For
> this reason my description was of J as in effect a splendid
> and simple calculator: a .ijx window and a simple alternation
> of user keying in an expression and the J interpreter putting
> back a response.
I am afraid i have not made myself clear either (see below).
>
> In this approach there is no place for diversions into compilation
> or to jijs.ijs. The user needs only J primitives and tacit
> definitions. At least such was my intention. That was why
> the incompleteness of tacit J was so frustrating.
>
>
> Well, there's another example above. But really my basic
> reasoning is that [ and ] are great as verbs that in effect
> bring into a function (verb) expression the arguments of
> that function; the user controls where the arguments are
> used by placing [ or ] where those arguments are needed.
> Therefore it is a simple analogy that [. and ]. could be used
> to bring into an operation (adverb or conjunction) expression
> the operands of that operation, the user controlling where the
> operands are used by placing [. or ]. where those operands
> are needed.
>
> Is there some problem with this that I can't see ? It looks
> straightforward to me.
>
Your rule:
> I would apply the simple rule that ]. always gives
> a conjunction whether [. appears or not, but
> otherwise [. gives an adverb.
seems to be straightforward, but English is often ambiguous (this thread
clearly (?!) shows that) a working computer program is much less ambiguous .
One can show a nice specification but problems might be revealed during an
after its implementation; you can browse my J Myths post that mentions some
apparent differences between, in Dan’s terms, J (the specification) and j (the
interpreter).
If you are confident that your rule is indeed so simple and clear then you
should be able to easily implement a working model of your proposal. You do
not even have to mess with jijs,ijs; for example,
adv=. 1 :
MyCode=. 'x (0 : 0)'adv
CompileAndExecute=. 'Compile and then execute:' ,: ]
CompileAndExecute MyCode
Line 0
Line 1
…
)
Compile and then execute:
Line 0
Line 1
…
My point is that you might have a better chance that your proposal is
implemented (so far the silence is deafening), if you show a working model but
even if it were not implemented, you and maybe some of us would have a handy
utility as a consolation. Again, I would had liked to see your ideas in action.
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