On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 10:23 AM, Tracy Harms <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > My take on the matter is this: Amb involves closures. J does not. > > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Guides/Lexical_Closure
It might, if that were made a part of the spec. Also, note that the jwiki page is outright wrong, since it completely ignores both gerunds and sentences when it claims: First: in J, a "function" is a verb. ... ... we need another class of entity to return "functions". The only possible candidates are adverbs (which take one argument) and conjunctions (which take two). Also, it's quite reasonable to treat both adverbs and conjunctions as functions. Also, as Oleg points out on that page, J's locales can be used to implement lexical closures. So I am not sure why I should agree with your "J does not." claim. Also, Dan -- monads are just syntactic sugar for how you write function arguments. The trick is that (for example) Haskell's IO monad involves a compiler based "cheat" that treats external data sources as if they were mathematical arguments. This would not have to be a "cheat" if the language were specified differently. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
