A human can deal with right-to-left evaluation by moving the cursor around to write in that direction. An LLM can’t do that on its own. A human given an editor that can only append would struggle too.
Re:
by anticensor on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @12:44PM
(#44512149)
Idea: feed the language model the parse tree instead of the textual sequence.
Might help. You could also allow it to output edits instead of just a sequence. Probably have to train it on edits to make that work well, and the training data might be tricky to obtain.
Re:
by gabiteodoru on Sunday July 13, 2025 @06:06PM
(#44554200)
Yep, that's exactly what my MCP server is doing -- write in a Python-like language (I called in Qython), parse into AST tree, write the q code.
Re:
by gabiteodoru on Wednesday July 09, 2025 @08:16PM
(#44516009)
Or, even better, also from the cookbook: {(2#x)#1,x#0} But this really borders on obfuscation :P
Re:
by leprechaun1066 on Sunday July 13, 2025 @02:40PM
(#44552471)
That does require someone to know that the take operator continues to treat the y list as circular when x is a list.
I think this form might be a bit easier: {(x,x)#(x*x)#1,x#0}
Re:
by gabiteodoru on Sunday July 13, 2025 @06:07PM
(#44554213)
But then you're not flexing your q muscles. Btw this is from the cookbook, these obfuscated patterns are actually recommended! https://code.kx.com/phrases/matrix/#identity-matrix-of-order...
Usually when someone solves problems with q, they don't use the way one would for Python/Java/C/C++/C#/etc.
This is probably a poor example, if I asked someone to write a function to create an nxn identity matrix for a given number the non-q solution would probably involve some kind of nested loop that checks if i==j and assigns 1, otherwise assigns 0.
In q you'd still check equivalence, but instead of looping, you generate a list of numbers as long as the given dimension and then compare each item of the list to itself:
An LLM that's been so heavily trained on an imperative style will likely struggle to solve similar (and often more complex) problems in a standard q manner.