Ric has posted a modification of Devon's Vocab page. If the objective is to have something clearer to the beginner, then the page needs complete consistency and some additional guides as to its structure.
Parts of speech If blue is to indicate verbs then some of the primitives after a. should be in blue. If colour is used to specify parts of speech there sshould be a key. In most Dictionaries headwords are followed the part of speech. The DoJ vocab page contains the part of speech encoded in the bold and italics. Brian's suggestion of including it is important because otherwise the modified vocab page gives no reference to parts of speech at all. The DoJ page includes an option to take you to an alternative listing of primitives by parts of speech as well. They could be listed in other ways from use of italic or bold or colour. Perhaps a key and the single letters could be used as in some library script documentation - v a c n o for verb adverb conjunction noun other. Sort order Most dictionaries have a standard lexicographic order. The DoJ states that J uses the collating sequence used by a. However the listing of the vocabulary is in a different order. What is the reason for the current ordering of graphics in the Vocab listing? If I ask J to sort the graphics of the primitives in the Dictionary I do not get the dictionary order of the primitives. I am sure Ken and Roger had good grounds for what they did, but maybe now is a time to think about it further. It is possible to envisage situations where you might want a dictionary of pieces of tacit code. What order should be used for that? The existing sort order for the J words in the code might be a good start but it is not too difficult to sort to the vocab order if the grounds for that are sufficiently strong and a case can be made for an English Dictionary order for the alphabetic characters with upper case followed by lower case for each letter and the letters in the standard order. Dyadic and Monadic and Bivalent Verbs This indication of usage is useful in the Vocab page. Using o for the symbol on the vocab page, the forms monadic o dyadic , monadic o , bivalent seem to cover all the cases and should be used for all cases. LevelOf should be Level Of o . The fact that some of the primitives can be used in a bivalent way ( |: and $. for example) should be clear from the vocab page because they have no o . The valence of verbs formed using adverbs or conjunctions depends on their arguments. Adverbs are monadic and conjunctions dyadic in terms of their own arguments. Fraser ----- Original Message ----- From: "Sherlock, Ric" <[email protected]> To: "Programming forum" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, January 25, 2010 5:41 PM Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] The Ambiguous Dictionary > This project looks promising. > Brian's suggestion > I have made some formatting changes to the Vocabulary page. > http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary > They can be easily reverted if not desirable. (doesn't include bold & > italics though). The formatting makes the source code for the page quite > messy, but once the links are finalized the page should be pretty stable > so that probably won't be too important. > > I've added a fourth column for ( {:: ) and ( &.: ) rather than trying to > squeeze them into 3 (still needs some work). It makes it clearer what is a > primitive and the columns look neater, but the close relationship between > &. and &.: is less clear. Anybody prefer 3 columns? > > What should we use for the names of the primitive pages? IMO ideally we > should use the symbols themselves. This seems to work quite well for the > majority of the primitives - see the page for examples. The exceptions > I've noted so far are: ( | |. |: . .. /. # ). There may be workarounds (I > haven't investigated very hard), but if not should we use the English > names? For all? Just for the exceptions? > > After we've sorted out the page naming, some example entries might help > suggest a design for a wiki page template. > > Ric > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
