Welcome, Jim. To find out about '99x' you can go to
http://jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/vocabul.htm (the Vocabulary page) and click on Constants next to the bold face Vocabulary. You have to look hard to notice Moreover, digits with a trailing x denote an extended precision integer, and digits followed by an r followed by further digits denote a rational number. See Section II G. You can click on the blue Voc at the top of a help page to return to the Vocabulary page. Back on the Vocabulary page, you can click on x: Extended Precision in the lower right corner of the page. (You will have encountered x: if you followed the reference to Section II G.) Finally, if you have the windows version of J, you can press the F1 key to see the Vocabulary page cited above (actually you see your local version). Michael Dykman wrote: > Pleased to meet you Jim. > > extended precision, like so many things in J, is too simple to be > obvious. I believe your problem translates as: > > ! i.99x > > - michael dykman > > > > On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 3:59 PM, James Foit <[email protected]> wrote: >> [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? >> >> >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
