J in Racket

Installation

Probably the easiest method is to create a local link using raco pkg install in the top level of this repository. This will create links so that require and friends work properly.

Motivation

I've been playing with J a little, and the rank-based implicit looping and point-free style are very appealing. As a fan of Racket, I'd like to see all the cool ideas from other languages available. This in theory would mean that any cool language could be implemented easily on top of Racket using appropriate libraries and simple parser and translation modules (tricky semantics aside).

So, for fun, my goal with this project is to implement most or all of the J language in Racket, and factor out all the useful bits into separate collections which can be packaged separately.

Status

Language support is far from complete, but some simple expressions ("sentences") can be evaluated. I've made a start on a Racket-style "ranked apply" which is one of my favourite concepts from J.

There is a #lang j which isn't very useful, but will evaluate J sentences in order.

You can (require j) to get access to a j procedure for evaluating J sentences.

Example:

> (require j)
> (j "+/ 1 2 3")
6
> (define sum/j (j "+/"))
> (sum/j '(4 5 6))
15
> (sum-j '(1 2 3) '(4 5 6))
(array #[#[5 6 7] #[6 7 8] #[7 8 9]])

Using frames:

> (require math/array j/rank)
> (apply/rank + (list '(100 200) (index-array '#[2 3])))
(array #[#[100 101 102] #[203 204 205]])

Note that this is the usual Racket + function. You can define more advanced operations by using lambda/rank.