On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 8:45 PM, neville holmes<[email protected]> wrote:
> At the risk of boring long-term readers of this forum,
> my repeated suggestion has been for the use of [. and
> ]. to name operands just as [ and ] name arguments.
> Then with &[. [.& &]. or ].& you would effectively
> have third an fourth arguments.  There would be many
> other simplifications then made available as well.

And, at a similar risk, I feel I should point out that [ and ]
do not name arguments.  They are verbs which select
arguments.

If they named arguments, this would be illegal:
   a=:1 [ b=:2

To see why that would be illegal, you should try
replacing [ with a name in various sentences.

   a=: 1 c b=: 2
|value error: c

   c=: 3
   a=: 1 c b=: 2
|syntax error

And, of course, many other aspects of J would start
failing if [ and ] were changed so that they named
arguments.

-- 
Raul
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