dly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry, I thought this thread was about readability - composition is > quite another matter - so write once read never.
While APL and J have been accused of being write-only language, this attribute can be applied to any programming language. One can write elegant and readable code in any language. One can also write compact unreadable gibberish in any language. It is a matter of style. Do you write short sequences of code and then combine them? or single expressions with as few parentheses as possible that are harder to parse than compound sentences in German? Do you use descriptive variable names? or non-mnemonic one-letter names for everything? Do you use plenty of comments, or leave them out, assuming that the code is self-documenting and 'obvious'? These are issues that affect all programming languages, not just J. APL and J do have one distinctive difference - it is POSSIBLE to write much more complicated expressions given the same real-estate, so if one measures code in terms of square inches, of courss it's possible to write much more inscrutible code in APL or J than one can in C++. -- Mark D. Niemiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
