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diff --git a/doc/tacit.md b/doc/tacit.md index 8c67efaa..cd2e2847 100644 --- a/doc/tacit.md +++ b/doc/tacit.md @@ -14,7 +14,7 @@ In smaller amounts—portions of a line—tacit programming can be the clearest The first of these expressions is the most direct, but with the variable name buried inside, it can't be used on an intermediate value and its input will have to be named. The other two forms stand alone as functions, so they can easily be placed anywhere in a program, even as an operand. But with even the small amount of structure added by a BQN anonymous function, the second method has more organization than action! The third, tacit, version strips away most of the organizing syntax to leave us with the essential pieces `0`, `<`, and `/` joined by combinators. The explicit function uses `𝕩` as a sort of pronoun ("I want the elements of it where it's greater than zero"), while the tacit one elides it ("give me the elements greater than zero"). -The ability to easily combine tacit and "explicit" programming such as statements or anonymous functions, far from being only a way to mitigate the disadvantages of these two methods, brings new advantages that no single paradigm could accomplish. Purely tacit programming *requires* programs to use *no* local variable names, but partly tacit programming *allows* them to use *fewer* names. That means names can be used only for the parts of a program that represent clean, human-understandable concepts. Another possible stategic choice is to use the fact that variables in a tacit expression are expanded as it's formed but those inside a block aren't. So `F←a⊸+` can be chosen to "freeze" the value of `a` in `F` without having to use an extra variable, while `F←{a+𝕩}` uses the current value of `a` each time `F` is called. +The ability to easily combine tacit and "explicit" programming such as statements or anonymous functions, far from being only a way to mitigate the disadvantages of these two methods, brings new advantages that no single paradigm could accomplish. Purely tacit programming *requires* programs to use *no* local variable names, but partly tacit programming *allows* them to use *fewer* names. That means names can be used only for the parts of a program that represent clean, human-understandable concepts. Another possible strategic choice is to use the fact that variables in a tacit expression are expanded as it's formed but those inside a block aren't. So `F←a⊸+` can be chosen to "freeze" the value of `a` in `F` without having to use an extra variable, while `F←{a+𝕩}` uses the current value of `a` each time `F` is called. The rest of this page describes BQN's tacit programming facilities. Deciding when to use them is a matter of taste, and experience. |