Kristan ,

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John Scholes' derivations in http://www.dyalog.com/dfnsdws/n_derive.htm in response to an email on Dyalog's Yahoo group shows the essence of my goals in respect to computer language . I bet you have never seen any computer language that looks anything like it . John is the retired chief designer and author of Dyalog APL , and I consider to have the best aesthetics of anybody .

There's a link at the bottom of the page to get Dyalog's font if the page doesn't look like this :

.

 The little circle which would be better centered between its left and right arguments is compose which essentially glues its arguments so they act as one . The umlauted squiggle is commute and is one of the brilliances John added to Dyalog before anybody else recognized its necessity .

The whole exercise is to see whether a function like ,  as a basic example mean or average , which uses just one argument , albeit more than once , can be restructured to reduce that to a single reference , so it can be elided leaving a pure functional ( verb ) string .

That starting expression for mean can be read as "divide the sum across the argument  by the count of items in it" .
If you like like algebra , you can love APL . I think I gave you a copy of Dyalog they gave me in Montreal .


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I've really been taking far too long too long on my article/proposal for a reason to go to the second Heartland climate conference to be held in March .

 I'm hung up on making sure I get the conversion to integrating over solid angle patches on the sheer , right .
The text up to the equation I need to finish is at http://cosy.com/Science/HeartlandProposal0811.htm .  I guess the integral will end up being over differences in 4th powers of temperatures in all directions .

The first example to compute is a disk , black towards the sun and totally reflective on the night side , because that would determine the maximum temperature any object in orbit  could be simply heated by the sun .

Finally , the same unfolding , to use the term that was popular with the catastrophy theory people when I was at NU , needs to be made for wavelength .

That should give the "null hypothesis" equation to calculate the effect of non-uniform albedo and non-uniform spectrum  .

I look forward to your comments .


 -- Bob Armstrong -- www.CoSy.com -- 719-337-2733 --