Subject: J design questions
From: mslamm@pluto.cc.huji.ac.il (Zvi Lamm)
Date: 30 Jan 1995 18:51:15 GMT

Could someone involved in the devolpment of J describe how design
decisions were reached in the process of designing the language?
For example a hook " x (f g) y " in J  means x g (h y), when it could for
example be (h x) g (h y). The J choice is better, and many such examples
exist. Was it luck, intuition or something else?

I once read that before desiging APL Iverson made a study of all possible
boolean operators, or something like that. As far as I remember the idea
was to enumerate all possible "truth-tables". This must have given him
some ideas...

Being new to J, I notice many times that expressions just tend to be
right - because the semantics are good. But it also seems to me
non-intuitive. It seems that the design process was interesting...

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