[seqfan] Re: J-language.

[Douglas McNeil]

For my part I wasn't recommending deleting it, even given my
bemusement.  What's the harm of an uber-cryptic program, as long as
there are alternatives?  After all, unlike obscure sequence
definitions, if you don't like an obfuscated program it's easy to
ignore; and in this case since I can make nothing of it at all, it's
frankly impossible to do otherwise.

I just thought it worth noting, because I'd never come across anything
like it before --  I still think that this is the most obscure OEIS
code I've ever seen -- and wasn't entirely convinced it wasn't an
esolang joke of some kind.  If we allow unintentional comedy, I'd
maintain it actually is, and a pretty good one.  But even if it were
intended as a joke, until the OEIS starts getting flooded with
programs in Chef or Gravity or the like it'd be churlish to remove it.

One can compare the syntax of J with those of the languages, many
quite sophisticated, at http://esolangs.org/wiki/Language_list and
with more typical OEIS-code languages like Maple or Mathematica if you
think my suspicion that this code wasn't intended completely seriously
was unreasonable..  But as our list manager has noted following that
up would be quite off-topic.


Doug

-- 
Department of Earth Sciences
University of Hong Kong