Re: [Bug-apl] box and unbox that work uniformly and without exceptions

[Blake McBride]

Dear Fred,

Thanks for taking the time and effort to provide your feedback.  I looked at your example.

I gave my example in simple terms in the hopes that the full extent of the idea would be understood.  In my explanation of the problem, I should have made it clear that the key can be any character scalar or vector except ''.  So, the key can have spaces or any other ⎕AV character.  In fact, the key ken even be just a space.

The value can be any character or numeric scalar, array, or nested array containing anything including ''.

Given the above, neither ⊃ and ⊂, nor your code can handle those parameters.  Box / unbox can.

Thanks.

Blake

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 10:07 PM, Frederick H. Pitts <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello Blake,

        After having asked you to present a use case where the behavior of
box/unbox differs from enclose/disclose and you graciously replied, I
felt obligated to spend a little time studying the issue.  I did that
and have come to the conclusion that both boxed and nested arrays are
overkill for the use case.  The key-value pair text (separated by a
blank) or key text can be supplied in a character vector which can
easily be parsed for the presence of one or two words.  See the attached
blake1.apl.gz for a demonstration.

        I would like to make the observation that nested arrays must not be too
bad.  After all, the revised code to fix their shortcomings only took 5
lines written in terms of nested arrays.

Regards,

Fred
Retired Chemical Engineer

On Sat, 2014-05-17 at 22:20 -0500, Blake McBride wrote:

> Lastly,
>
>
>       ⍴(box 'abc'),box 'def'
> ┌→┐
> │2│
> └─┘
>
>
> Blake