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BQN: What Is a Primitive?

ople sometimes wonder how the set of primitives in BQN was chosen. Outsiders to array programming might assume that the "big idea" of APL is just to take the most common tasks and write them with symbols instead of names—even Dijkstra said something like this, calling APL a "bag of tricks"! I don't think this is quite right, so I'd like to explain my personal view on why it makes sense to call a few special operations "primitives" and give them dedicated symbols.

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