OpenEuphoria

Re: direction

• Posted by Everett Williams <rett at GVTC.COM> Mar 22, 2000
• 431 views

Irv Mullins wrote:

>On Wed, 22 Mar 2000, you wrote:
>> Here are some 'one liners' from the J dictionary. J is even more powerful
>> than APL and all ASCII to boot.

snip

>>
>> Jay Daulton
>>
>> m0=: /:~        Sort the array y in ascending order
>> m1=: \:~        Sort the array y in descending order
>> m2=: /:~"_1     Sort the items of array y ascending
>> d3=: /:@:{ { [  Sort indices x according to y
>> d4=: ]/:{"1     Sort table y according to column x
>> d5=: \: at [`(/: at [) @. ]   Grade x up if y is 1 and down if y is 0
>> d6=: \:~ at [`(/:~ at [) @. ] Sort up or down  (Try literal argument)
>> d7=: /:~        Sort y according to x
>>
>>
>> d0=: -:&(/:~)   Are x and y permutations of each other?
>> m1=: /:~-:i.@#  Is y a permutation vector?
>> m2=: -:-@|:     Is y antisymmetric?
>> m3=: -:|:       Is y symmetric?

snip

Despite all the unintended humor provided by this little listing, it is easy to
see matrix ops in J are, as in APL, about as shorthanded as you can get.
Of course, the next question is...how many of you do that kind of matrix
math.

>Ooops! How did they let that actual _word_ (rxmatch) thru?
>If it weren't for that little slip, "J" would certainly qualify as the world's
>most unreadable (computer) language.
>
>Irv - wondering if you made all this up as a joke. If so, congratulations -
>it's a good one.

Euphoria is very transparent except where it deals with C or uses C
constructs like print/s/f or at the various other points where it uses
peek and poke. These too, are shorthands, that, while short
and reasonably logical are completely foreign to the reader at first glance.
They do not provide enough contextual information to easily interpret
what they are doing without loads of knowledge external to Euphoria or
lots of carefully constructed examples. In the case of peek and poke,
they rely on knowledge that the language itself says is not necessary...
somewhat bit order and significant byte dependent and completely
foreign to the basic concept of the language.

I, for one would prefer more explicit, self-documenting means of accessing
these items.

Everett L.(Rett) Williams
rett at gvtc.com