So, the joke that paragraph doesn't contain, is it about what empty arrays those other languages don't have?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin <moku...@sugarlabs.org> wrote: ... > The next paragraph does not contain any jokes. The one after does. > > It is very easy to prove that any computable function can be expressed > in one line of APL, as I showed in APL News, Vol. 21, No. 1. A > slightly trickier problem is to prove that a program for any > computable function can be written in APL using only empty arrays. > Without nesting, empty arrays have only shape and type, but with > nesting they can have prototypes, allowing much greater variety of > data structures. LISP has one empty array, commonly known as NIL and > written (); almost all other programming languages have none. ... -- Devon McCormick, CFA ^me^ at acm. org is my preferred e-mail ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
