16. Word Formation
The interpretation of a written English sentence begins
with word formation. The process is based on spaces to
separate the sentence into units, but is complicated by
matters such as apostrophes and punctuation marks:
was and Brown and Ross’ are each
single units, but however, is not
(since the comma is a separate unit).
The following lists of characters represent sentences
in J, and can be executed by applying the do
or execute function ". :
m=: '3 %: y' d=: 'x %: y' x=: 4 y=: 27 4096 ". m 3 16 do=: ". do d 2.27951 8
The word formation rules of J are prescribed in
Part I of the dictionary.
Moreover, the word-formation function ;: can be applied
to the string representing a sentence to produce a boxed list
of its words:
;: m +-+--+-+ |3|%:|y| +-+--+-+ words=: ;: words d +-+--+-+ |x|%:|y| +-+--+-+
The rhematic rules of J apply reasonably well to English phrases:
words p=: 'Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent' +-----+-+-----+-+----+---+-------+ |Nobly|,|nobly|,|Cape|St.|Vincent| +-----+-+-----+-+----+---+-------+ >words p Nobly , nobly , Cape St. Vincent
Exercises
| 16.1 | Choose sentences such as pp=:+//.@(*/) from earlier exercises, enclose them in quotes, and observe the effects of word-formation (;:) on them. |
| 16.2 | Move the cursor to the left of a line so that it is separated from the line by one or more spaces, and press Ctrl F1 to display the individually boxed words in the sentence. |