Sorry to be a little slow in posting this , but , hey , the disk crashed .

This is the first newsletter composed in K.CoSy itself . Its utility , and my
comfort with it , has evolved that far . And this letter contains several
executed
examples which are simplest to work thru live in K.CoSy .

Everyone in the NYC area , remember the CoSy_MidWinter_Gathering 15
( 0 origin ) is coming up Monday Feb 4 . See
http://cosy.com/current.htm#20020204 for details .

I expect to get out the second part of "Y K ?" by the end of next month .
It will discuss the flexibility provided by K's syntax to "factor" problems
along
the most useful lines .

--

/ ==================== / tue.jan.20020108 / ==================== /
K.CoSy NoteComputing Newsletter020109

.R />/ `.CoSy
/(/ 1043 / Astoundingly , Friday 020104 , I had another destructive disk
failure on the Sony R505TE I bought July 24 to replace the Z505SX whose
disk failed in June . Pulling apart the -SX to get at the ( Toshiba ) disk
to FedEx it off to Carbondale IL to be retrieved , I broke the clip on the
connector to the touchpad . This error defeated reassembling it with the
IBM 20G drive I dropped near $200 to pointlessly get quick .

I am now up on the Z505SX which Raj Chetiar's brother Vishu just
reassembled and reloaded with Windows 2000 . Vish had the brilliance
to simply plug in a mouse to obviate the touchpad problem .
This is the first time I have ever used a mouse for more than 5 minutes .
It's an interesting experience , but I continue to prefer the old EMACS
aesthetic of never having to move my hands from the keyboard .

This time I just lost material since 011211 , and most of that time I was
accompanying my brother Jack , http://cosy.com/art/jacka/jacka.htm , out
to our sister Joyce and her girls and parrots and big white dogs and horse
out in Colorado Springs . In 28 years , the apron of the Front Range has
has been infected with a continuous rash of human habitation for at least
the 160 kilometers between CS and Boulder where I visited my high school
( http://Culver.org ) adventure bud Gary Neptune
( http://NeptuneMountaineering.com ) and his wife Bibi who met each other
at Everest base camp .


Anyway , I've reconstructed a couple of the few words I defined during the
lost period , and I think they are interesting enough to post .
In any case , that absolutely backs them up .

Work in K.CoSy follows the hierarchical dictionary ~ directory , structure
of the K-tree . For instance ,I have my personal work and accounts in a
Job dictionary named `BobA , and work on Raj and my partnership ,
CoSy_Homes , is in a Job dictionary , `Homes .
So it's very common to be writing and executing , e.g. :

`show $ `BobA

. It's so common that I keep lists of lines to " `show $ " this or that
around in the various Jobs I work in . It's so common that I keep lists
of the most common objects , for instance `.CoSy.BobA.Ref , in which I
keep all my account numbers and passwords , etc , in the f8 Command
window , `.Cmds .

But , one of the aspects of K.CoSy is keeping logs of daily activity ,
For instance , here are my notes in `.CoSy.Boba earlier this morning :

/ 0844 / email / 0936 / Emilio m w Andrea , cb ~ 12 / c> / Raj

. I wanted to be able to display the job containing all my interactions
with Raj with just a keystroke . And I wanted to be able to do it on
names appended to earlier work . Therefore , I created the words below ,
and modified a couple . I've found this mechanism so time saving that
after downloading my last backup of my working c:/CoSy.csd from my
web host , I reconstructed the vocabulary so I could start `BobA
without writing even one redundant " `show $ " .

Here is the vocabulary : ( All of this is executed in the Root : .CoSy ) /)/

text..f9..h : " `show $ `\" name after last comment token in current line\" "
text..f9 : " `show $ . ( .R `lastseg ) _v . _i "

lastseg : { *| tokcut[ C ] C , x }
lastseg..h : " returns section of string after last comment token "

C : " / " ; C..h : " the primary comment symbol "

/ `tokcut is previously defined
tokcut..h
" split string `y at multi char token `x "

/ I also needed to regularize my timestamps to be compatible :

hm : { C , ( -4 # "00" , $ *| ts x ) , C }
hm..h
"current time . hour & minute"

/(/ That's it . It reduces showing an object to writing down its name , eg :

`.CoSy.People.Raj

and tapping f9 . ( Incidentally , I tried f10 , but that seems to be hard
wired to be an alternative "alt" key . )
( Note in the example from my notes above , I have a variable `Raj defined in
`BobA holding `.CoSy.People.Raj . )

Here are a couple of other recent miscellaneous new words :
/)/

KtoM : 1.609344 ; KtoM..h : " Kilometers % Mile "

matchR : { ( .:' x ) ~' .R x }
matchR..h : " do objects in active dictionary match same objects in Root ? "

( .R `matchR ) `text. `r. / Its motivating use .

/ 1311 /

A final thought : Sasha Skomorokov pointed out ( in APL ) that

1 ~ { x ~ | x : 10 _vs x } 2002

which was last true in 1991 and will not be true again for 110 years .

may this symmetry presage a peaceful and productive year .

/ 1344 / All for now / Bob A /

--
Bob Armstrong -- http://CoSy.com -- 212-285-1864
http://CoSy.com/K/CoSy.htm : Rapid Quantitative Modeling
http://CoSy.com/Homes : Building Affordable Homes in NYC
2002/01/16 10:07:59 AM