I'm a novice in J, and when trying to write programs, I'm very often use boxes
to store arrays of different length together, like this -
+---+-------+-----+
|1 2|3 4 5 6|7 8 9|
+---+-------+-----+
Those arrays are usually results of previous steps of computations, and
semantically the rows are similar, but I can't store them in a table, like this
-
1 2
3 4 5 6
7 8 9
because J requires all items to have the same shape. So, I end up doing boxing
and unboxing.
As far as I know, the reason to have boxes in J was to allow to have elements
of different "kinds" - like ranks, or lengths, or types - in the same array. Is
it reasonable to have boxing/unboxing operations to be done implicitly in the
case like above - or am I missing other important uses of boxes?
Alexander
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