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nprescott | 6 years ago

Not long ago there was a post about using English language instead of the J symbology[0] but the end result isn't meaningfully easier to understand because of all the prerequisite knowledge of how evaluation works etc., once you've worked that out most of the "line noise" has already sunk in. I think that's a big sticking point against creating a second "inflatable" notation - though there is always Nial[1]

Not entirely an answer to your question, but J provides introspection/help in a pretty direct way via two distinct means, the first is ;: ("words") which will show you the parse of a J phrase (here, a pretty direct translation of the algorithm in the article):

    ;:'+/s>(s,#v)$/:\:,/v&%"0 (0.5+i.s)'
    ┌─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬──┬──┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬─┬───┬─┬──┬─┬─┐
    │+│/│s│>│(│s│,│#│v│)│$│/:│\:│,│/│v│&│%│"│0│(│0.5│+│i.│s│)│
    └─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴──┴──┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴─┴───┴─┴──┴─┴─┘
Which shows the tokens of the phrase, which can be helpful if you are unsure of where a symbol or diacritic is being used. Inside the J IDE you can get context sensitive help by pressing Ctrl-F1 on a symbol, if you were interested in /: for example, you are directly linked here[2].

I am unaware of a similar tool in K, which should not be taken to mean it doesn't or can't exist. One of the reasons I'm interested in J has been the tooling and documentation available.

[0]: https://wjmn.github.io/posts/j-can-look-like-apl/

[1]: https://tangentstorm.github.io/nial/intro.ndf.html

[2]: https://code.jsoftware.com/wiki/Vocabulary/slashco

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