Re: [Bug-apl] ⎕ES wrong message

[Blake McBride]

That "return nil" is clearly a typo and a further reflection of the poor quality of that spec.  I offer the following as proof that that comment is a typo:

1.  Look at the signature of ⎕ES at the beginning of 11.5.7.  It says:

    ⎕ES  B

it does not say:

    Z←⎕ES  B

like they do everywhere else when a quad function returns something.

2.  In IBM APL 2 ⎕ES never returns a value.

3.  Having ⎕ES return a value did cause me an unnecessary problem.

Where they day "return nil", they should have said "return".

Blake

On Mon, Jul 14, 2014 at 9:56 AM, Kacper Gutowski <address@hidden> wrote:

On 2014-07-14 16:15:32, Juergen Sauermann wrote:
> Since ⎕ES is not ISO-standard anyhow, I take the freedom to trade performance
> for APL2 compatibility.

But it is.  See sections 11.5.7 and 11.6.5.
And standard says it should return nil for empty right
argument, which means not returning any value at all.


-k