Matthew Brand wrote: > there is something about the way [public J code] > is organized that does not exactly make it easy > to find programs that are already written to > do the thing you want to do.
A common lament. The NYC JUG has entertained the idea of taking the help index for a popular programming language (e.g. VB or C#) and filling it out with pointers to J implementations. That's a lot of work, and still suffers from the "chinese menu" or "synonym" problem (Roget's malady). For example, if you were looking for Ric's utility, would you seek "make directory" or "create directory" or "mkdir" .... ? And what would the next guy search for? My personal (uneducated) opinion is that the J world is small enough to include in the distribution (i.e. the Forum archives, a copy of jsoftware.com, and any other relevant J resources -- maybe even the PDFs linked to from the Wiki Bibliography). Then the frontend could provide a UI to search all these files (and could even pass the buck to a standard file searching tool like grep). > What would be great is a "J in a Nutshell" book Before we even start, we must address the most important question: what would the colophon be? A Jay? A Jaguar? A Jackal? A Jellyfish? -Dan ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
