[1] INTRO
Hello everyone. I'm Jim. I found J while searching for APL and couldn't have
asked for a more personalized language (not least of all because the language's
name is my first initial). Brief background: I taught APL to senior Industrial
Engineering students a quarter century ago. I recognized then that APL, and
now J, was something that other languages weren't: "It was/is a language
designed to meet the needs of the mind rather than the needs of the computer."
I love it.
[2] VIEWPOINTS
I've read ur comments for a few days and have a few opinions. J is a LANGUAGE.
As such, let's revert to Shrunk and White's "Elements of Style": Shorter is
better. I'll adjusted it a bit: Excluding sexuality, shorter is better 99% of
the time: Conciseness facilitates understanding. If you lengthen the programs
you are catering to people too lazy to learn the language and you might as well
just program in C.
On the flip-side from short code, I believe deeper documentation is better 99%
of the time. I don't mean longer, I mean documentation that has hypertext
links to every term/concept related to J. The links would eliminate
redundancy, maintain conciseness, and enhance understanding. There would be no
reason for people to whine about not being able to read code since they would
have the ability to click on any primative (or other things such as often used
tacit programs) and pull up a definition for it. With this, getting over the
learning curve would be far far easier.
[3] PLEASE HELP ME
Where can I find information on extended precision. I found a little bit in
section 32 of JfC, but it's a bit hard to follow. Specifically, I need to make
an array with 99 elements with each element being n!. This is done with this
code:
x =: ! i. 99
Unfortunately, I need at least 40 digits of precision. I tried a bunch of
stuff. Failed. This one gave me a domain error:
]e =: ! 40 ": i. 99
Any suggestions?
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