Brilliant, Raul. Just the sort of thing I was thinking of (...but
without the expertise to get anywhere with it).

Geriatric coders like me need crutches like this. I've always gone to
enormous lengths to avoid two bugs: the Elephant Trap and the Weinberg
Bug (ISBN-10: 0932633420). The latter, if you recall, was a documented
case where $thousands (a lot of money in the 1950s) was spent tracking
down an elusive bug to the fact that a certain memory location
labelled ONE sometimes got the value 2.

Case in point: nothing took me any time at all to debug in LoBrow.
Except one perplexing glitch (related to the Weinberg Bug) which
wasted an entire evening ...

I started off with a monad, which I altered to get the value I was
passing as "y" from a global noun. Alas, I didn't replace all
instances of "y". My subsequent invention :-) of "nilad" was, let's
face it, a futile attempt to lock the stable door after the horse had
bolted. The "horse" in question being my precious evening.

Younger folk, with some grey cells left, will be shaking their heads
in contempt. Why didn't the blind old boomer simply use "Find..."?
--they'll say.

Ian


On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 10:48 PM, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Of course using a word like "nilad" to parameterise "define" enforces
>> nothing in the subsequent code, so really I'm fooling myself.
>
> If you do not mind slightly different grammar:
>
> niladic=: (0 :) (1 :0)
>  assert.-.'m n u v x y'e.&;:m
>  3 :m
> )
>
> This is an adjective.  Its argument should be
> a string, a boxed list of strings or 0 (in which
> case it must be followed by a script)
>
> FYI,
>
> --
> Raul
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