4 ms·
If you lose the symbols you lose the terse nature of the language, which as far as I can tell seems to be one of the most alluring parts of the language (the au
by 49bc 8y ago
If you lose the symbols you lose the terse nature of the language, which as far as I can tell seems to be one of the most alluring parts of the language (the author of the blog post shows game of life as essentially a one-liner).
- omaranto 8y agoDid you read any J programs? It is just as terse as APL. (Probably K is pretty terse too, but I won't comment on it as I only know J.)
- vorg 8y agoIn J, the parens, brackets and braces aren't balanced because those 6 symbols, i.e. `(`, `)`, `[`, `]`, `{` and `}`, are used as standalone symbols for other syntactic stuff, making J code very hard to read.
- omaranto 8y agoParenthesis are paired and have their usual function of groupoing. You are correct about brackets and braces though. Personally I do think J is often hard to read, but not because of the unbalanced brackets and braces.
- klibertp 8y agoNo, parens are parens, used for grouping. The rest is true, though: brackets `[`, `]` are essentially two flavors of identity function (dyadic) and `{`, `}` are indexing operators (not sure I remember right, but I think `(<1;2) { A` would be `A[1][2]` in more common languages).
- lobster_johnson 8y agoJ and K are extremely terse, though. They just chose other ASCII symbols that exist on everyone's keyboard.