Two observations:
(A) Some would say the computus itself is a "misguided goal" ("you have
innumerable instances of these dates" / "It seems to me that it is far easier
to define Easter to be April 1st"). Sometimes in life we do not get to choose
our goals.
(B) In this case, I was, and I chose the goal as I described it. Computus
is a solved problem; I have no use for this verb, I can look up the (currently
projected) dates of Easter from here to eternity. And transliterating the APL
already given in the Vector article is not a very interesting problem.
Upon reading the Vector article, my impulse and desire was to write a J verb
that took the table and some years as input, and produced the corresponding
Easter dates as output. My challenges were to improve this verb. (Of course,
you don't have to respond to the challenges, if you don't like them.)
-Dan
Please excuse typos; composed on a handheld device.
-----Original Message-----
From: Raul Miller <[email protected]>
Sender: [email protected]
Date: Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:30:52
To: Programming forum<[email protected]>
Reply-To: Programming forum <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] Computus
On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 5:21 PM, Dan Bron <[email protected]> wrote:
> Ah, but you're not. Hence the challenge!
>
> (The idea was to let the table speak for itself - essentially, build an
> interpreter for
> it, introducing as little complexity as you can manage. Yes, this is a fuzzy
> goal.)
To me, this is a misguided goal.
You have two instances of these tables.
It seems to me that it is far easier to upgrade those two tables, and ask that
new tables be written in this format than it is to write an
interpreter for all the
tables which might exist but do not.
That said, using_1 |: before assignment would be cleaner
than the approach I used.
--
Raul
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