So, the joke that paragraph doesn't contain, is it about what empty
arrays those other languages don't have?
On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Edward Mokurai Cherlin
<
mokurai@...> wrote:
...
> The next paragraph does not contain any jokes. The one after does.
>
> It is very easy to prove that any computable function can be expressed
> in one line of APL, as I showed in APL News, Vol. 21, No. 1. A
> slightly trickier problem is to prove that a program for any
> computable function can be written in APL using only empty arrays.
> Without nesting, empty arrays have only shape and type, but with
> nesting they can have prototypes, allowing much greater variety of
> data structures. LISP has one empty array, commonly known as NIL and
> written (); almost all other programming languages have none.
...
--
Devon McCormick, CFA
^me^ at acm.
org is my
preferred e-mail
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For information about J forums see
http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
