Rank beginners
Rank in q refers to the number of arguments a function takes – or the number of indices you can use to index an array. Because Apply and Index have the same syntax, functions and lists are syntactical...
Blog Articles
QR: Quick Response quite reasonable; quirkily rectangular
Turning a URL into a QR (Quick Response) code is an illuminating exercise. Following the description of the algorithm posted by Vidurangi Kalpana, and setting aside the business of representing a bool...
Flouring the loaf
Now here’s a task that cries out for a simple solution: put a border round a matrix. My matrix is boolean and represents a QR code (yes, we’ll come to that) but it’s the same problem as, say, putting ...
All that jazz: The librarian’s song
Because q is a proprietary language, most of us know it as a language we learned in order to query large datasets. But q is a general-purpose programming language. The 32-bit interpreter is free for n...
Missing some items
We encounter the enlist keyword early in learning q; a reliable way to make a one-item list where 1# won’t do. But there is a bit more to enlist than that. In the first place, it is not only variadic ...
Five easy pieces #4: Little Six
“Golden age” or not, England under Elizabeth I was a very minor European power. Keen to be part of the cultural mainstream, its poets imitated Italian forms such as the sonnet. And a tricky French for...
