Wow, thanks for that clue. Will have to take a closer look at that source now. I don't feel too bad for not really getting it, given the creator of J saying this about it:
My immediate reaction on seeing the page was recoil and puzzlement: it looked nothing like any C code I had ever seen. (“Is it even C?”) However, Ken counselled that I should reserve judgment. As recounted in An Implementation of J, it then happened that:
I studied this interpreter for about a week for its organization and programming style; and on Sunday, August 27, 1989, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, wrote the first line of code that became the implementation described in this document.
The name “J” was chosen a few minutes later, when it became necessary to save the interpreter source file for the first time.
My immediate reaction on seeing the page was recoil and puzzlement: it looked nothing like any C code I had ever seen. (“Is it even C?”) However, Ken counselled that I should reserve judgment. As recounted in An Implementation of J, it then happened that:
I studied this interpreter for about a week for its organization and programming style; and on Sunday, August 27, 1989, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, wrote the first line of code that became the implementation described in this document.
The name “J” was chosen a few minutes later, when it became necessary to save the interpreter source file for the first time.