'Potential problems though include stalled processing and yak shaving' You need to elaborate on this, I don't see what this has to do with anything.
'but I do not draw the conclusion that this means that working with prefixes of descriptions of infinite arrays is a particularly good idea' and this as well, after all, a prefix of an infinite list is no longer infinite Additionally, infinite arrays are of course not helpful for performing calculations on data sets, they are mainly a theoretical exercise, although I am of the opinion that they would be very helpful for solving problems involving searches on infinite sequences, since 'while.' and '^:', are slow, and having to guess an upperbound (here is the arbitrary prefix of an infinite list) is just ugly. The physical impossiblity of an infinite array has never been an issue for mathematics, and i.&1@:whatever@:i._ would be the idiomatic solution. Finally, a non negligible aspect of such infinite lists are how impressive they are. J must impress newcomers or they will not be willing to spend the considerable effort required to even get anything done in the first place. I have no idea how many people choose to learn J nowadays, but I suspect nowhere near enough. ________________________________ From: Source <source-boun...@forums.jsoftware.com> on behalf of Raul Miller <rauldmil...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 3:44:04 AM To: Source forum Subject: Re: [Jsource] Propositions On Tue, Feb 27, 2018 at 9:15 PM, james faure <james.fa...@epitech.eu> wrote: > Funny that you would say that, since It seems to me that the more lightweight > the description of > an array is, the easier it is to operate on the whole thing at once. Potential problems though include stalled processing and yak shaving. Both of these have to do with hitting the problem at the wrong level of abstraction. In my experience, working with J on large data sets, it's extremely useful to run through the concepts on very small sets of data, first, so that you can verify that things are working right and that you understand the data. Working with very large sets of data can be quite a burden (finding a conceptual error a month into the calculations is quite different from finding an error an hour in or a few seconds in - at that point you need to think things through and decide what you can salvage). This agrees with the abstraction you brought up that "the more lightweight the description of an array is, the easier it is to operate on the whole thing at once" but I do not draw the conclusion that this means that working with prefixes of descriptions of infinite arrays is a particularly good idea. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
