On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 2:30 PM, Alan K. Stebbens <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Presumably you mean the alphabetic text between
> > an = and the next non-alphabetic character.
> > For this kind of thing functions other than ;: are
> > more straightforward. Thus:
> >
> > alp=: a.{~,65 97+/i.26
> > f=: (('='={.&>) # }.&.>) @ (-.@(e.&alp) <;.1 ])
>
> Can any of you honestly say that the above sentence is
> "straightforward"? :^)
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>
Oleg and Dan have already replied affirmatively but they both eat tacit for
breakfast.
However, even as someone who uses tacit notation sparingly, I can parse this
pretty well, I think. Breaking it into left- and right-hand pieces at the
central "@", I see that the right side is partitioning on non-alphabetics
and the left side is retaining the partitions, less their first item, which
begin with '='.
I found the right side a little more puzzling at first but was able to work
it out by considering it in pieces. Also, a major advantage of J is its
interactivity: there's no requirement that I have to parse a phrase simply
by looking at it when I can paste it into a session and play with variations
of it until it makes sense.
We get these accusations of "absolute unreadability" pretty frequently in
the "APL" world, usually from people so familiar with some other arcane
notation that they no longer see it as difficult to read. The French
language is also unreadable to people who don't know it but few expect to be
able to understand it based only on their knowledge of English.
We lightly covered the topic of reading J at the latest NYCJUG so perhaps
this is my cue to get those meeting notes posted, though it looks like John
may have taken the incentive to update his wiki page on the topic:
http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/JohnRandall/ReadingJ .
--
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
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