On Dec 18, 2007 8:39 AM, BobGraf <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Just look at the majority of forum articles. I am a member of all the > forums except the Beta one. Many of the messages are oriented towards > getting the most bang out of one J sentence, terse, cryptic stuff. Books on > APL warned against doing this because it leads to poor readibility, and if > you're doing any serious development, you will have problems down the road > maintaining this code. Those same articles reference the need of extensive > commenting so that the code can be easily understood even by its author even > six months later! Most NB.'s I see in these articles are little more than > line titles. Before the days of the internet, such programming style was > referred to as "cyberporn".
There are practical reasons for this. The language and its session manager are line oriented, so single lines are easy to test (and, thus, develop). Generally, when I post code like this, I expect that interested readers will take my line of code and some representative sample data and plug it into a J session and play with it (for example rephrasing, perhaps replacing some "last dyad" with ; so I can see its arguments). When I am posting for beginners, I will often include such steps explicitly in my message. -- Raul -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
