When would you ever say f"f ?


----- Original Message -----
From: Zsbán Ambrus <[email protected]>
Date: Wednesday, November 10, 2010 7:06
Subject: Re: [Jprogramming] Atop u...@v with v of negative monadic rank
To: Programming forum <[email protected]>

> On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 3:15 PM, Roger Hui <[email protected]> wrote:
> > The change you propose is non-trivial and has consequences
> > that may surprise you (and many others, I expect).
> >
> > Suppose f is <"_1, and you make the "combining rank" of
> > f be _1 instead of the current _ .
> >
> > So the ranks of ]...@f would be _1 (_1 _1 _1).  Suppose the
> > argument x is i.2 3 4.  Since the ranks of ]...@f are _1,
> > x is split into the cells i.3 4 and 12+i.3 4 and you apply
> > ]...@f to each cell.  [...]
> 
> You're right in that combining ranks shouldn't have negative integers,
> because that too would make (f"f) mean something different from f,
> such as in the case when (f=:<"_1).  I accept that that 
> change would
> be a bad idea, so I retract that part of my suggestion.
> 
> On the other hand, are there many surprises or incompatibilities even
> if you take only the weaker variant of my proposal?  That 
> says that if
> rl is a negative integer and rr is a nonnegative integer, the diadic
> combining rank of f"(rl,rr) should be (_ _) instead of 
> (_,rr).  For
> example, the combining rank of (]"_ _3 7) would be (_ _ 
> _).  The case
> with left and right swapped would be handled similarly.  
> The combining
> ranks would still always be nonnegative.
> 
> As I said, this too would be better than the current state 
> because it
> would help uphold the f -: f"f identity, which the current semantics
> does not do for such verbs.
> 
> Ambrus
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