On Sat, Apr 2, 2022 at 9:18 AM Henry Rich <henryhr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I oppose this, I think strongly. > > .. and .: should never have been defined. They do very little and take > up valuable codepoints.
I am on the fence about these. From a language perspective, I would be most concerned about if and/or where they are being used. Anyways, although I listed them first (I pulled the list from the j901 release notes), I would prefer to focus on the other primitives. > The mathematics primitives come from a period where J was trying to > compete against Mathematica IIUC. The problem with them is that the job > to be done is a little too big for the syntax suggested for them: I am not sure about that. In any event, these are useful primitives and they have been used. Moving their implementations into library code seems like the right decision, but that's a different issue. > Maclaurin series are of interest, but not nearly as much as general > Taylor series; but the two-operand t-functions do not admit specifying a > point. This distinction seems moot. For example, under j807: %@(-&1)t.i.5 _1 _1 _1 _1 _1 > The calculus functions are OK for differentiation, maybe, but > insufficient for integration where definite integrals are important. > Contour integration in the complex plane is part of the problem domain. Isn't that language (and/or library) extension territory? Computers are finite and have limitations. But we do not, for example, remove the use of floating point numbers because of their (well documented) limitations. Anyways, for the t. and d. families, it seems like using a library implementation and retaining primitives which call into those libraries is the right approach. This supports older content while opening the door a bit wider for future improvements. > Raul: I can answer your questions about t.c, either privately or in this > forum. I am all ears. Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
