Intro16


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.