🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ROCKWELL.92Apr8164502@socrates.umd.edu> rockwell@socrates.umd.edu (Raul Deluth Miller-Rockwell) writes:
|J uses '.' and ':' as inflection marks, which modify the token
|immediately preceeding them on the line.  It's not very hard to
|remember to use <<space dot>> where before you just used <<dot>>.  Or,
|to be more accurate, you must now use <<slash space dot>> where before
|you used <<dot>>.
|
|But I think the thing you're really objecting to is that J doesn't
|impose any reserved words on the user.

Actually, one of my biggest criticisms of J is that it is one of the
worst "reserved word" offenders I've seen: there is a large vocaublary
of operator symbols allowed by J's lexical rules (like & and *:) and
EVERY ONE of them is reserved. If this isn't foolish I don't know what
is. Part of the reason, of course, is that there isn't enough of a
type system to resolve overloads. But it seems really silly to say
"these are my letters and those are yours" and make it impossible to
build application-specific notation within the language.
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stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
stephen@estragon.uchicago.edu                    University of Chicago
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