Re:GNU APL 1.8
by vincent-toups on Sunday June 23, 2019 @01:43PM
(#20257279)
Looks neat. After using J for awhile I've come to dislike the who monad/dyad thing. It must be an old Lisper thing, but I wish there was just a regular argument list and all the arguments had the same semantics.
I know in J you can used an array of boxed objects to "simulate" "normal" function definitions except that you don't get the rank behavior for those argument lists. Nothing prevents a language from having "normal" functions and also being able to support rank on each argument.
https://www.dyalog.com/uploads/documents/Papers/dfns.pdf
For example, you can write {expr} to introduce a Direct Function (dfn), where expr is an APL expression in which α and ω represent, respectively, the left and right argument of the dfn.
Dfns also support local definitions, and recursion with ∇.