On 25 January 2017 at 05:54, Elias Mårtenson wrote: > Is there anything inherently wrong with having more quad-commands? What is > the reason we have to do ⎕FIO[49] instead of simply ⎕ReadLines or something > like that? > > It's like we're going out of way to make code unreadable. I know APL is all > about terseness, but I think this is going too far. Am I alone in this?
The important difference is that it changes the language itself and it's nice to have as small and unchanging language when possible. Is ⎕ReadLines a quad-function/variable or an apposition of the evaluated input (⎕) and ReadLines variable, i.e. a two-element vector? As of today it's the latter, and it's a perfectly valid construct. Adding new quad- function makes some otherwise conforming programs suddenly incorrect. Yes, recent changes to ⎕FIO broke some programs in exactly the same way, but these were already not portable. -k
