OK, I've never used either language, and don't have interpreters to hand. So I could be wrong, and anyway, I was talking more about the approach to programming rather than the actual APL outer product operation. But my understanding is that the outer product in APL despatches at run-time on the dimensions of its argument, so if R is an n1*...*nj array and S is an m1*...*mk array, then o.x R S is an n1*...*nj*m1*...*mk array. I don't know if there's a version of outer product which takes a functional argument, but I expect so (and almost certainly in J, which is apparently influenced heavily by functional languages).
There's an excellent explanation of an APL program on this page (http://www.chilton.com/~jimw/setgame.html) - I found it pretty mindblowing when I first read it. I want to learn APL/J at some point for the same reason that I want to learn Haskell better - to expand my mind, and give me new ways of thinking about programming. Though they're using the word "monad" to mean "unary function", which I'm afraid I can't support :-)
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There's an excellent explanation of an APL program on this page (http://www.chilton.com/~jimw/setgame.html) - I found it pretty mindblowing when I first read it. I want to learn APL/J at some point for the same reason that I want to learn Haskell better - to expand my mind, and give me new ways of thinking about programming. Though they're using the word "monad" to mean "unary function", which I'm afraid I can't support :-)