On Thu, 12 Nov 2020, J. Clarke wrote:
> This is kind of the old story. When there's more than one way to do
> something and no sound reason to prefer one over the other, let the user
> or the developer decide. We do it with quad-IO, why not with the branch
> directions on complex calculations?
FWIW I have always thought ⎕io was not a great idea. Most people I have
spoken to on the matter feel similarly.
Any publication on APL needs to specify whether it has ⎕io as 1 or 0. (Or
do the trick where you add/subtract ⎕io to/from indices, which is if
anything even worse.) It bifurcates the language and makes it harder to
reason about as a unity.
If you need a trig function with branch cut that goes the other way,
define one inline. It's a fairly niche use-case, and not a particularly
burdensome definition; and it alleviates the main language of overloads.
-E
|
|