On 7/19/06, Roger Hui <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
J does not have non-rectangular arrays. It would be strange to have an exception for them in amend.
Boxes are fully featured lists. The only thing lacking is the verb semantics to go with them.
> i would like to see J more capable of dealing with lists
This is a major extension and a major piece of design and implementation. It can not be added just willy-nilly.
Yes, understood. Lisp is implementable in a page of code. A major reason it was one of the first languages invented. The beauty of K is its marriage of APL and Scheme. So simple and compact. J is vastly complex in comparison. So i am not saying it is easy - just that the semantics of list processing is an extremely important approach to handling large regularizable data sets. In particular XML type data would benefit tremendously. Moving data between K and XML, and its manipulation, is trivial. Not so J. A good exercise would be to see just how much of the semantics of Scheme can be accommodated by simply implementing the implied operation of current definitions of J operators. Eg allowing all the cases of boxed arguments. i would guess the language would end up being simpler, as well as more powerful. ~greg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
