On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 9:12 PM, June Kim (김창준) <[email protected]> wrote:
> To some people, numerical computation and handling isn't too
> attractive. They are more interested in string manipulation.
For what it's worth: I spent about 10 years working on text
manipulation programs in APL. And I started by debugging race
conditions on them in a multi-user environment. (Which means not just
reading them but discovering subtle, non-reproducible issues in other
people's code.)
So, anyways, I am of the opinion that APL and J are rather nice for
text manipulation.
That said, I rather miss a couple utilities from APL which no one has
seen cause to re-implement in J:
ssdir and ssndx
ssdir=: I.@(= {.),.#;.1
ssndx=: [: ; (<@:{~ (+i.)/)"1~
ssdir '/abcd/efg/hijkl'
0 5
5 4
9 6
(1 4,:~6 3) ssndx '/abcd/efg/hijkl'
efgabcd
and, of course, as I have just now demonstrated, they can easily be
represented in J. But the apl versions I was using were hand-coded
assembly language so they were very fast, and in J they are slow
enough it's usually better to just use the underlying operations
directly.
Anyways... J is quite nice, in my opinion, for text handling. In some
contexts perl or bash can be nicer, but not always.
--
Raul
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