With practice you will be able to build more complex definitions tacitly; however, there are benefits to making the definition is steps. Each step handling an easily understood thought. In your case you have three steps, not too difficult to handle in one step, but can illustrate how you can handle tacit definitions which are much more complex.
Take your three steps: nCr =: !~ n14Cr =: 14&nCr n14Cr2=: ! * n14Cr n14Cr2 3 2184 Looks like it works. But it still references all the definitions of each step. There is an adverb f. (Fix) which substitutes primitives for defined names. n14Cr2=: (! * n14Cr) f. n14Cr2 +-+-+------------+ |!|*|+--+-+-----+| | | ||14|&|+-+-+|| | | || | ||!|~||| | | || | |+-+-+|| | | |+--+-+-----+| +-+-+------------+ Notice that now n14Cr2 is all primitives. The references were removed. It still works. n14Cr2 3 2184 If you would like to see it in text form use 5!:5 to see it in text form. 5!:5<'n14Cr2' ! * 14&(!~) This is not a very complex definition, but with this process you can build extremely complex tacit definitions in many steps, each step testable to verify its validity. And using the steps, debug at the step level to find errors. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
