Stages of Denial

Re:Stages of Denial by rak1507 on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @12:46PM (#28131083)

An anonymous function is defined (can't find a better word) between braces like {x+1}, in python (lambda x: x+1). There is an inner one, {x,+/-2#x}, and the outer one (the entire thing).

/ (like a lot of k symbols) does a few different things depending on context. In this case, if you do n f/x, where f takes a single argument (is a unary/monadic function), it applies f to x n times.

-2#x: yeah, it seems reasonable that it might negate the first two elements, APL uses ¯2 instead of -2 for this reason. In k however -2 is parsed as one number, as - then 2#...

Sure, there may be some complexities or questions, but there are in all languages, and in this case they were fairly simple things anyway to me.

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Re:Stages of Denial by gjulianm on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @01:16PM (#28131519)

> here is an inner one, {x,+/-2#x}, and the outer one (the entire thing

So in the inner one, x is the argument of the inner function or the argument of the outer one? Is x always an argument to anonymous functions?

> / (like a lot of k symbols) does a few different things depending on context

That's a recipe for confusion.

> Sure, there may be some complexities or questions, but there are in all languages

I can go back to the initial example: just browse other implementations of Fibonacci in different languages. For most of them you can actually understand a bit what's happening, even if it's a different paradigm (e.g, I can understand the Haskell or Clojure implementations without too many issues, and in fact I can learn things about the language from that). But operators that do different things depending on context, insistence on non-standard symbols, weird scope issues... That's not "complexities or questions that are in all languages", that's a recipe for confusion and extra complexity that you need to have in mind on top of the complexity of whatever you are coding.

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Re:Stages of Denial by rak1507 on Wednesday August 11, 2021 @08:34AM (#28141234)

Default arguments to anonymous functions are x, y, and z. You can also name arguments like this. {[foo; bar] foo+bar} is the same as {x+y}

I'm not denying it is probably more possible to gain a superficial understanding of what code written in other languages does than code written in k to someone who's never seen k before. This just doesn't seem like that important of a language feature. The 'confusion and extra complexity' you mention wouldn't really confuse anyone who'd tried k for more than a couple of hours (at most).

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