I did indeed mean replacing an element by its index. It was just a
general interest question, though. There are instances where I've had
a boxed list representing some kind of object, and I've wanted to
replace a box at a certain index with a new box with its contents
applied to some monad.

On 23 November 2010 22:24, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 5:05 PM, Justin Paston-Cooper
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> What is a common phrase for replacing element n in an array a by
>> itself applied to a monad m?
>
> Note that m is often used to refer to nouns rather than verbs,
> (in explicit adverbs and conjunctions) so lets use M instead of m.
> Also, 'a' is an english word, so let us use A instead of a.  And,
> for consistency and emphasis, let us use N in place of n.
>
> The most common phrase is:
>   M A
>
> Of course, this replaces all of A with the result of M, but
> that is usually good practice.  But this means that you
> have to pull the conditional logic into the definition of M
> which sometimes may be an issue.
>
> If A is numeric, you can use
>   A + (N=A) * (M A)-A
>
> Or, if you want a tacit version of that:
>   N (] - = * (- M)@]) A
>
> If A has only one dimension, you can use:
>   (M (N=A)#A) (I.N=A)} A
>
> That said, I just now noticed a response from Dan
> Bron where he understood N to mean the index of
> a value rather than the value itself.  And that is
> another possibility.
>
> I suppose the really correct approach, here, would be to ask
> what problem you are trying to solve.  This sort of question
> (where you are focusing on an  individual element of an array,
> rather than the array itself) seems to suggest a problem where
> perhaps a better approach could be available than the one you
> are trying to apply.  (Or, it would be if I were posing this kind
> of question.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> --
> Raul
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