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The most uncompromisingly APL-ish code I've written is the BQN compiler[0]. Hard to write, hard to extend, hard to refactor. I generally recommend against writing this way in [1]. But... it's noticeably easy to debug. There's no control flow, I mean, with very few exceptions every line is just run once, in order. So when the output is wrong I skim the comments and/or work backwards through the code to find which variable was computed wrong, print stuff (possibly comparing to similar input without the bug) to see how it differs from expectations, and at that point can easily see how it got that way. The compiler's whole state is a bunch of integer vectors, and •Show [a,b,c] prints some equal-length vectors as rows of a table, so I usually use that. The relevant code is usually a few consecutive lines, and the code is composed of very basic operations like boolean logic, reordering arrays with selection, prefix sum, and so on, so they're not hard to read if you're used to them. There are a few tricks, which almost all are repeated patterns (e.g. PN, "partitioned-none" is common enough to be defined as a function). And fortunately, the line prefaced with "Permutation to reverse each expression: more complicated than it looks" has never needed to be debugged. Basically, when you commit to writing in an array style (you don't have to! It might be impossible!) you're taking an extreme stance in favor of visible and manipulable data. It's more work up front to design the layout of this data and figure out how to process it in the way you want, but easier to see what's happening as a result. People (who don't know APL, mostly) say "write only" but I haven't experienced it. [0] https://github.com/mlochbaum/BQN/blob/master/src/c.bqn [1] https://mlochbaum.github.io/BQN/implementation/codfns.html#i... |
Don't suppose you can point to any resources to help wrap your head around BQN, do you?