Hmm... that's not Iverson, but puzzling out the meanings of the various quotes there is an interesting exercise.
I imagine that the Joel Moses quote is about the amount of and coherency of the math theory behind the language design. And... the Dijkstra quote largely reflected Dijkstra's distaste for most everything. Anyways... I guess some of that essay is about beginner mistakes. For example, he asks about mean`median = 'mean';'median' 1 1 +`- = '+';'-' 0 0 and assumes that the relevant issue here is primitives vs. user defined names, when the issue was shape (in other programming languages the distinction between characters and strings). But a lot of programming issues are like that. At the end of the day, we are working with machines and the limitations of the machines are sometimes significant. Thanks, -- Raul On Mon, May 16, 2022 at 11:16 AM David Lambert <[email protected]> wrote: > > If I come across this again I might remember to let you know. J comes > pre-overloaded, (we call it dense) such as the forty-x uses of b. or > cuts. The issue I recall was for class dependence of operators. > Concretely, in Ken's J there would not be a locale specific definition > of + . The reasoning was something like this quote from > https://crypto.stanford.edu/~blynn/c/apl.html > > Apart from decreased code size, overloading makes puzzling out a J > one-liner even more intellectually stimulating. However, we > sacrifice too much clarity. For each verb, we must first determine > whether if it is monadic or dyadic before we can discern its meaning. > > I shun function overloading in C++. One is courting obfuscation when > a function’s meaning depends on the type and number of the inputs > and outputs. > > {{+ > > 'In this nightmare scenario + became a conjunction' > > return. > > v m > > }} > > Thanks for your investments in j, > > Dave > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
