[Jprogramming] What are the strangest features of J?

[Miller, Raul D]

 Henry Rich
> 3.  no declarations; any noun can be an array

And the same assignment syntax is used for operations as is used for nouns.

   x=:*
   2 x 2

> 5.  A list of numbers is a single word

And words can have other sorts of structure, like 2b1010101 3 4j5e6 
or f__o  Some syntactic words are structured in other languages 
(floating point numbers, strings, ...) but J does a number of things 
that other languages do not (such as allowing spaces in some words 
which are not strings).

> 6. modifiers (adverbs and conjunctions)

Another issue is J's I-beam (!:).  Other languages tend to hide
this kind of thing.

Oddly enough most of these "strange features" of J have some
parallel in with things which are familiar in other languages.
Not always the same languages, but for example SQL shares some 
of J's "implicit looping" and languages from the LISP and Forth
families often have or allow things like { } etc. to be verbs.

-- 
Raul