It's trivial to uncompress J tokens (add spaces between tokens). To read and quickly comprehend an expression in J or any language requires practice. Why do all programming classes teach people how to write a programming language? Shouldn't they also teach people how to read the language? Germans have no problems with looooong words, but I can't read it. Chinese and Japanese have no problems with a token representing an entire word or concept. Why? They have practiced reading for years. How many people practice reading a programming language? They just complain that the program isn't well documented with comments. And they slug their way through it, eventually they comprehend the program.
Personally I get overwhelmed with all the parentheses in Lisp. But I'm sure if I practiced reading Lisp it would not be a problem. One doesn't comprehend the implications of Maxwell's equations in a glance, no matter what the notation. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
