Raul wrote: > I think the maximal cell would be the entire array? Maybe.
Or maybe the terminology was introduced to cover degenerate cases*. In general, a verb of rank N (as a non-negative integer) can never see a noun with rank greater than N, but it is certainly possibly for it to see nouns with ranks less than N. For example, %. (matrix inversion) is rank 2, but also accepts rank-1 arrays (vectors) and treats them as degenerate matrices. In that case, a “maximal cell” could be intended to convey a cell of exactly rank N, a minimal cell would be of rank 0 (i.e. an atom), and a cell that was greater than zero but less than N would be non-minimal and non-maximal. For the sake of completeness, it’s worth saying again that a verb of rank N can never see a noun of greater than rank N; rank will chop up the noun before it’s ever fed to the verb as input. -Dan * I don’t know; I haven’t read the source material. I’m just pointing out the possibility. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
