Intro 16. Word Formation

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16. Word Formation
The interpretation of a written English sentence begins with word formation. The process is based on spaces to separate the sentence into units, but is complicated by matters such as apostrophes and punctuation marks: was and Brown and Ross’ are each single units, but however, is not (since the comma is a separate unit).
The following lists of characters represent sentences in J, and can be executed by applying the do or execute function`".` :

       m=: '3 %: y.'
       d=: 'x.%: y.'
       x.=: 4
       y.=: 27 4096

       ". m
    3 16

       do=: ".
       do d
    2.27951 8

The word formation rules of J are prescribed in Part I of the dictionary. Moreover, the word-formation function`;:` can be applied to the string representing a sentence to produce a boxed list of its words:

       ;: m
    +-+--+--+
    |3|%:|y.|
    +-+--+--+

       words=: ;:
       words d
    +--+--+--+
    |x.|%:|y.|
    +--+--+--+

The rhematic rules of J apply reasonably well to English phrases:

       words p=: 'Nobly, nobly, Cape St. Vincent'
    +-----+-+-----+-+----+---+-------+
    |Nobly|,|nobly|,|Cape|St.|Vincent|
    +-----+-+-----+-+----+---+-------+

       >words p
    Nobly
    ,
    nobly
    ,
    Cape
    St.
    Vincent

Exercises

16.1 | Choose sentences such as`pp=:+//.@(*/)` from earlier exercises, enclose them in quotes, and observe the effects of word-formation`` (`;:`)`` on them.
16.2 | The following facility is available under Windows and Macintosh: Move the cursor to the left of a line so that it is separated from the line by one or more spaces, and press Ctrl F1 to display the individually boxed words in the sentence.

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