Re: [Bug-apl] ⎕FIO[49]

[Kacper Gutowski]

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