We will do our best to give appropriate visibility to the x. vs x change. During the beta it has had good visibility, but we need to
be careful with the general release.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark D. Niemiec" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, June 05, 2006 4:00 AM
Subject: [Jprogramming] Re: J Installation Broken
"Eric Iverson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This change for the 601 beta and final release is discussed briefly in
Help|Release Highlights.
Since this change, unlike most changes to J in the past,
will likely break virtually EVERY single piece of existing code,
perhaps it should also be mentioned more prominently
than just a footnote in the Release Hilights.
>From: "Joseph Peralta" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> f =: 3 : 'y.'
>
> |spelling error
>
> | y.
When I first read about this change in version 6,
it struck me as very disruptive and unnecessary,
although after playing with it or a while, I found it
to be quite pleasant. My only major reservation
about it is the growing pains it will cause to those
with large bodies of existing code (I myself have
often written things like: 'x y z' =. y. which will
suddenly exhibit incompatible behavior after a
mere mechanical translation).
Making such major changes very obvious up front
will make transition to the newer version less painful.
(For the most part, when upgrading to a new version
of J, most of what I see in the release notes is usually
of the form "xyz performance improved" or "xyz added
new functionality" - things that are often useful to know,
but if you aren't aware of them, it isn't really that important,
so they don't have much impact on the existing code base.)
This is the first change I have seen in a very long time
that is not like this (the removal of operator trains in 5.x
was similarly major in scope, but had a much smaller
impact, since they were used very seldom).
-- Mark D. Niemiec <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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