On Jan 7, 2008 1:26 AM, neville holmes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ... That was > when I started writing a book on using tacit J to > generate integer sequences, a focus I thought > to be appropriate. I even had Wiley wanting to > publish the book, which I had showed them in > outline with early parts filled in. I gave this > away when I found myself having repeatedly > to resort to 1 : and 2 : explicit expressions for > which I had to put the explanation in a footnote > explaining that they should just use it and not > try to understand it. There was just no way > to make such explanations part of the carefully > staged development of tacit J that I had designed > the book around. However, something like my > suggested [. and ]. could be fitted in because > its texture is like that of [ and ] which fitted in > delightfully well. > > Remember that the people I was trying to reach > were not programmers, nor people who would > want to be programmers. I was very careful not > to talk about programming at all, but to treat > tacit J and its interpreter as a kind of > supercalculator. That's why I couldn't launch into > the 1 : '...' and 2 : '...' forms.
I think I would find this argument more convincing if I thought you understood J's parser better. In my experience, "I can not explain concept x simply" typically means "I do not understand concept x". That said, note that I am not necessarily disagreeing with you, but before I would be comfortable agreeing, I would have to better understand some point which I currently must be missing. Let's take the "average" verb: avgv=: +/ % # avgv 1 2 3 2 Now, let's say that I wanted this to be an adverb avga=:1 :'+/ % #' =avga 1 2 3 2 What kind of programming background is required, here? I understand that, pedagogically speaking, a person would wonder what the point of this added complexity is. But curiosity is good, and I could address that with another example (which uses u), and some short bit of explanation. Anyways, maybe I do not understand this obstacle you were faced with. -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
