On 6/30/06, dly <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The result of a search in the OneLook Dictionary search
( www.onelook.com ):
Sorry, no dictionaries indexed in the selected category contain the
word anadic.
...
1) Both `niladic' and `anadic' enjoy some use in
computing, although `niladic' is admittedly more
heavily used.
2) Referring to dictionaries cannot help in deciding
between `niladic' and `anadic'. Both are made-up
words. None of them is present in any of Oxford,
Webster, Cambridge or American Heritage dictionaries.
And if a computer dictionary (are there many of them,
or do they all just copy each other?) mentions `niladic',
it invariably ascribes its origin to APL:
http://foldoc.org/foldoc.cgi?query=niladic&action=Search
(in fact, Gilman & Rose's `APL: An Interactive Approach',
1976 is referred to).
3) `Anadic', having the Greek prefix, is at least
`less ill-formed' than `niladic', and is consistent
with `monadic', `dyadic', and `polyadic'.
4) Surely, there are other ill-formed, Latin-Greek
(or Greek-Latin) words in English. None of them will
cause the next mass killing of people to take place,
but at least such anomalies are worth mentioning.
The J community has a tradition of strong interest
in terminology and language in general, hence my
previous post here.
5) I did not (and do not) propose to erase every
existing record of the word `niladic' and replace
it with `anadic', but I believe that we have good
reasons to consider the possibility of using `anadic'
at least as frequently as `niladic'.
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