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J Compiler

J is Ken Iverson's successor to his famous APL language.

For many sorts of hacking on arrays, APL is enormously productive because all the explicit looping over arrays is suppressed.

J retains all the power of APL, but uses standard ASCII in place of APL's oddball semi-hieroglyphic character set.

J also introduces a number of neat new programming ideas.

It is quite literally possible to do in half a line of J code things which would require half a page or more of code in most other languages. This can be handy when the dawn deadline for code delivery is rushing toward you.

Having a J compiler for Muq would also give C-fixated users of Muq at least a glimpse of life beyond the Algolic fold!

J is quite a simple language, so the scanning, parsing and compiling would be relatively straightforward: Most of the work would probably be in implementing the needed operations on arrays -- which would be good tools to have, useful from the other Muq languages as well.

This one is fun but not critical, so (alas) I'm not likely to get to it in the forseeable future. I'd be delighted to help out with server tweaks and such if someone else took the initiative here!


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