Raul wrote: > you are more concerned with the style (the way things appear) > than with the substance (the mechanisms used) of such expressions?
Yes? Isn't that the topic of this thread (tacit style vs explicit style)? Isn't the "ugliness" you mentioned referring to the way things appear? Doesn't "ugly" always refer to the way things appear? I mean, if I were concerned with what instructions the computer executes after I enter a particular line, then for 13 : n I might be concerned with tacit code, or C, or assembly, or machine instructions, or hardware instruction pipelining, or transistor state changes.... But yes, I thought we were discussing the relatively legibility of the ways I can instruct the computer to do those things. If so, the ugliness you quoted cannot be ascribed to the tacit style. That code was using the explicit interpreter, and so was explicit. Of course, other, different uglinesses could be ascribed to tacit J, depending on one's perception of ugly [1]. And I like this thread because I'm seeing a lot of different perceptions. So far, all the perceptions have been in the context of reading J, I would be interested in seeing some perceptions of *writing* explicit vs tacit J. I think a lot of us tacit fans got that way because of the joy of writing tacit J..... I recorded some of my thoughts about that at [2]. -Dan [1] Personally, I think composition conjunctions are very useful and powerful, but intrusive. Hence my "verb pipelining!" quip yesterday. [2] http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DanBron/Style/TacitVsExplicit ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
