On Wed, April 4, 2012 12:18 am, Devon McCormick wrote: > So, the joke that paragraph doesn't contain, is it about what empty > arrays those other languages don't have?
Well played. More precisely, what jokes other programming languages are. ^_^ > On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin > <moku...@sugarlabs.org> wrote: > ... >> The next paragraph does not contain any jokes. The one after does. >> >> It is very easy to prove that any computable function can be expressed >> in one line of APL, as I showed in APL News, Vol. 21, No. 1. A >> slightly trickier problem is to prove that a program for any >> computable function can be written in APL using only empty arrays. >> Without nesting, empty arrays have only shape and type, but with >> nesting they can have prototypes, allowing much greater variety of >> data structures. LISP has one empty array, commonly known as NIL and >> written (); almost all other programming languages have none. > ... > -- > Devon McCormick, CFA > ^me^ at acm. > org is my > preferred e-mail > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks -- Edward Mokurai (默雷/निशब्दगर्ज/نشبدگرج) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
