On Wed, 2010-08-25 at 07:14 +0800, bill lam wrote: > I guess you think J is a functional language. What if you are told J is > not a functional language?
Hi Bill! Thanks, but I want to learn J, not to get into a philosophical dilemma about "functional languages"... :) Having said that, my view is that if you've got: 1) nameless functions, 2) can pass functions as arguments and 3) lazy evaluation (which I'm sure is manageable in J - though not often necessary) then you've got a functional language. The main difference I can now see (with my newbie vision) between J and other FLs is that J does not rely as heavily on recursion, because of its marvellous handling of arrays. This has got to impact on programming _style_ a bit, but even though I am somewhat used to the elegant recursive style, the incredible speed gain you get with J is more than worth it for me. > There were lengthy discussions on this subject in > J forums. Please search forum achieve for detail. I am sure I'll read those discussions at some stage, but first I have to finish Rich's book, then Roger's, the the Dictionary... so loads of reading ahead. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
