I was enjoying Chris Burke's 1996 essay on "Elegant Programming" - http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/elegant.htm - but when I tried some of his examples, one did not work. The elegant derivation for harmonic mean from arithmetic mean:
am=. +/ % # hm=. am &. % When "hm" is used on the argument "2 3 5" as shown in the essay, it returns the input instead of the answer "2.9032258". A little investigation uncovered that the definition of harmonic mean in contemporary J should be hm=. am &. (%"_) It would be nice to have these good examples that work with current J though it would lose some historical perspective. Would it be possible to update this essay to include the currently working code, perhaps with a footnote indicating the historical evolution of the language? Regards, Devon -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
