Re: APL & Programming Concepts

phil chastney <phil.hates.spam@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in
news:HaoWj.226457$XH2.46775@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 

> Randy MacDonald wrote:
>> <snip>
> >
>> No APL vendor is going to know all the needed primitives in advance, 
>> so that expectation is kind of excessive.
> 
> nobody asked the APL vendors to know all the needed primitives in
> advance 

Perhaps I'm misinterpreting your earlier statement:
> I don't want to use named cover functions for rational multiplication,
> any more than I want to use them for complex multiplication

I see it as saying that one wants APL primitives to handle one's pet
area of functionality.  Once I developed 'new' and 'to' functions,  I no
longer needed to wait for the whims of the vendors: 

Perhaps I should have said:  no APL vendor is going to have primitives
for everyones pet functionality, because once one person asks for it,
everyone will feel they have the right.  That doesn't scale. 

For complex numbers: given a dyadic verb 'j' (why do I name it that?
:-)which creates complex numbers: 

   3 j 4 -- 3+4i -- 3 4 new 'complex' could work as well

and the usual stuff falls out:

   'show' to (1 j 3)'*' to 2 j 4
   -- normalized display could be just another message
-10j10  


> the suggestion was that some people might like to define their own
> types -- i.e, user-defined types, as opposed to primitive types --
> which relieves the APL vendors of the aforementioned expectation
> 
>> For me 'new' and 'to' are all the tools I seem to need for OO,
>> typing, whatever it is called this week.
> 
> that's fine for you, but doesn't seem to satisfy the guys who are 
> looking for complex arithmetic
> 
> interesting that you should equate OO and typing  --  I would agree 
> 100%: rationals and spreadsheets occupy different ends of the
> spectrum, maybe, but they certainly lie on the same spectrum

I'm thinking typing is oo for compiled languages;  it almost becomes
moot when you use APL. 

> quite why the two topics have developed their own vocabularies is 
> something of a mystery to me (but then, so are many other things)
> 
> /phil