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diff --git a/commentary/overload.md b/commentary/overload.md index 0adcc25d..bb2dee41 100644 --- a/commentary/overload.md +++ b/commentary/overload.md @@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ There are examples outside the array world that I find worse than anything in BQ Sometimes what seems like an extension can be unified into a single more general primitive. For example, APL has [scalar extension](https://aplwiki.com/wiki/Scalar_extension) to allow you to add, say, a scalar to a list in `1 + 2‿3‿4`. J and BQN use the more general [leading axis agreement](../doc/leading.md#leading-axis-agreement), which has this extension as a special case (although incidentally, BQN removes some unprincipled extension of list-like functions like Reverse to rank-0 arguments). Character arithmetic can also be viewed in this way considering numbers and characters to be pairs of "characterness" 0 or 1, and a numeric value. -I think many primitive pairs, such as `-`, `⋆`, `«`, `⥊`, and `⍉`, fall into this category too. Primitives like can be described as a general dyadic function, and a monadic case that comes from a default left argument (sometimes dependent on the right argument: it's `(=𝕩)-1` for `⍉`). The primitive `⋈` is so tight it might be considered a fully compatible overload, returning a list of all arguments. Such primitive pairs can sometimes be used ambivalently in simple ways (`⋆⁼` is pretty nice), but more often the usefulness is just that it's easier to think about each pair as one thing rather than two. It's just two views of the same idea. +I think many primitive pairs, such as `-`, `⋆`, `«`, `⥊`, and `⍉`, fall into this category too. These can all be described as a general dyadic function, and a monadic case that comes from a default left argument (sometimes dependent on the right argument: it's `(=𝕩)-1` for `⍉`). The primitive `⋈` is so tight it might be considered a fully compatible overload, returning a list of all arguments. Such primitive pairs can sometimes be used ambivalently in simple ways (`⋆⁼` is pretty nice), but more often the usefulness is just that it's easier to think about each pair as one thing rather than two. It's just two views of the same idea. ## Mnemonic overloading |