Guides/Conjunctions

Henry Rich explains the inner workings of conjunctions:

Start with

x u c v y

where c is an explicit definition[; "u" and "v" are verbs, "x" and "y" are nouns.]

The first execution is (u c v). This has available the text of c, and the values of u and v.

If the text of c does not refer to x or y, it is simply executed on the given u/v and can produce any part of speech.

But if the text of c refers to x/y, what is to be done? These symbols have no meaning. To make sense of the situation the interpreter assumes that (u c v) creates something that will take its x/y arguments from the rest of the sentence.

In J, this result of (u c v) is required to be a verb. Thus its arguments x/y must be nouns and it must produce a noun result.

If there is no noun result, this is an error.