There is an amusing anecdote about the "minors" expression. One time, I was visiting Prof. Keith Smillie in Edmonton and had lunch with him. We took a bus returning from lunch. The conversation got to the J mug<http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/DavidMitchell>. Just before Prof. Smillie's stop, I asked him if he knew what the expression 1&(|:\.)"2^:2 on the mug did. He paused as he was getting off the bus, turned right around to get back on the bus, and we talked some more about minors.
This story elicited a chuckle from Ken Iverson when I told him about it. (He was the author of the expression.) http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/APLQA.htm#prefixes_of_suffixes provides another example of higher-dimensional arrays and "fixes". On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 12:20 PM, Devon McCormick <[email protected]>wrote: > I, too, read a fair amount of code. Some of it is for work, but with J, > it's more for pleasure. I really enjoyed gathering code examples for my > talk and spending some time explaining how they work. The "Extracting > Minors" example to which Dave Lambert referred me - on the "outfix" page at > http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/d431.htm - alerted me to the > power > of "\." and provided a good example of the usefulness of a > higher-dimensional array. > > It makes me think, per Joe Bogner's request, that there's a good book > waiting to be written about array-oriented thinking. > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
