In the J programming language, there's a culture of building new composite verbsby...
In the J programming language, there's a culture of building new composite verbs
by chaining existing ones without using named arguments.
The core mechanism behind this is called a train.
Two verbs form a hook, and three verbs form a fork, each evaluated in a specific order.
J interprets them automatically based on context.
This style of defining functions without explicit arguments is called tacit programming.
For example, the verb that calculates the average can be written simply as +/ % #,
a typical three-verb fork.
Tacit style offers benefits such as brevity, improved readability,
and potential performance gains through operation fusion.
However, care must be taken with omitted parentheses,
as misunderstanding precedence is a common pitfall.
Understanding the evaluation order of hooks, forks, and dyadic extensions is essential.
In the J community, such concise and elegant function expressions are affectionately called haiku,
and there's a culture of enjoying and competing over their aesthetic quality.