Yes, that is pretty much what I have been doing. With each step in my project, I determine what needs to be done, then I read the doc to see how to do it.Then I keep trying stuff untill I get it to work. One thing at a time.
I haven't reported all my various explorations and incremental test steps, as those are probably not of interest to the forum. My explorations and tests were primarily to help me learn J. I only post to the forum when I get to a point where I can't find an answer to what I want to do. Unfortunately, the fact that J uses different nomenclature from other programming languages makes the functions and routines that do what I want, hard to find. I don't want to have to read the complete language doc to find how to manipulate strings, for example. Once I found the script files for string manipulation, they do give some examples. However, nowhere in the string doc does it explain that deb"1 is required to remove blanks for a multi-dimentional text array. I realize that J gurus understand all about the rank operator, but that kind of thing should be included in the examples for strings and other functions, so beginners don't have to stumble around trying to figure out why their functions don't work. Removing blanks from a multi-dimension array should be a standard example in the strings doc, both for boxed and unboxed arrays. I understand that the J vocabulary page contains a thorough definition of each function. However the vocabulary is quite terse, and requires knowledge of the format to decode. The vocabulary would benefit from a vast expansion of the examples for each entry. I find that I can learn a language much faster if I have a project to do, and I try to implement that project in the new language. I really appreciate the help that all the forum members give, when I ask a question. Skip 2011/11/8 Björn Helgason <gos...@gmail.com> > You can of course work on each element in a boxed string. > > If I were you and beginning to learn J I would concentrate on one thing at > a time. > > Collect all the strings together, write or add them out as lines in a > result file. > > In the next step you can read that intermediary result file and do the > operations you want on them. > > Once you have finished all the steps you can begin to refine each step or > eliminate as you see fit. > > Going in for heavy J stuff while learning J at the same time may not be the > best way to go. > > As you see you are getting expert advice as you go along so you probably > know by now that your work is doable in J and many people know how to do it > and have done similar things in the past. > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
