I'm sure this is obvious but I'm a little unclear about it. Suppose I wanted to make a function do something like f(x) = 3x+1. Knowing the rule for forks, I expect to see something like this: [: 1&+ 3&* which is not that beautiful to me, but I guess is nicer looking that (1&+) @: (3&*) with the extra parentheses. Instead, if I query with 13: I get this:
13 : '1+3*y'
1 + 3 * ]
Way more beautiful, but I don't understand how it is possible. ] is the identity function, * and + are doing their usual thing, but how are the literals working here? Why is J not attempting to "call" 1 and 3 with arguments as if they are functions? I notice that this continues to do the right thing if I replace any of the constants with [ or ], so I think it is interpreting this as a train of some kind, but I'm not sure.
When J was first described, forks were all verbs (V V V), but then it was decided to let nouns be in the left tine position and return their face value. So (N V V) is seen as a fork as well. In some older code you can see the left tine of the fork show up as a 'verbified' noun such as 1: or 'a'"_ which act as verbs that return their face value when given any argument.
(N V V) configuration is described in the dictionary as "The train N g h (a noun followed by two verbs) is equivalent to N"_ g h ." http://www.jsoftware.com/help/dictionary/dictf.htm