Subject: I love it! (was Gaus)
From: mslamm@pluto.cc.huji.ac.il (Zvi Lamm)
Date: 24 Jan 1995 17:06:48 GMT

As some of you already know I am learning J in my free time (about 15
minutes a day... :-( ), and without any basic documents (like the
dictionary). So it is not surprising that I make stupid mistakes. But I
love to learn from them. So thans for all your comments.
Some remarks though:
1. I thought about reversing the array (vector), but did it using the
idea of an arithmatic progression as an exercise. Not beacause I am brain
dead!
2. I loved to see the other (and all of them better) ways of doing it. It
just show how rich J is. But it still doesn't answer my question - isn't
J (and APL) too rich?
3. I want to give special mention to Roger for teaching me that i. _n
results in the reverse of i. n. J's and APL's operator vocabulary is very
complete in the sense that (especially in J) operators have the *right*
meaning in so many contexts. In J with rank etc. it is really amazing.
Thanks - it makes me a happier person.

P.S
 I think that by having such extremely small examples available (maybe by
FTP) can really help beginners. I learned many languages by now and most
of them just by looking at examples. Since J is so different than other
languages most examples will be too complicated for a beginner. But maybe
such small examples + some short commentary can help someone just making
his first J steps. Comments?

--
Ehud Lamm     mslamm@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
