Re: Reader option to permit brackets as parentheses

[Allover Stripes <allover@hedgehog.dyn.ez-ip.net>]

Greg Badros <badros@cs.washington.edu> writes:

> AFAICT, guile only accepts () as parentheses;  I find it far more
> readable to be able to mix square brackets [] and round parentheses ()
> in my expressions.  Any thoughts about adding a reader option to permit
> this?

You might want to integrate it with guile's multi(programming)lingual
support, since that's really a different dialect of Scheme.  If you do
it flexibly, you might want to think about what a freiend of mine did:
wrote a (simple) Scheme interpreter in which [foo bar] meant to run
foo aynchronously.  This is probably infeasible for guile, but it's an
interesting idea.  Others have suggested replacing [foo bar] with
(lambda () (foo bar)) allowing
(new-if condition [display "foo"]) 
where new-if is a function (not syntax).

In short: I like the idea, but I'm not sure it should be a reader
option, exactly.  At least it should be available on a par with the
largely hypothetical ctax, elisp, and tcl translators, so that other
people can do nifty things with the new syntax.

On the other hand, worse-is-better has been nagging me all week; maybe
just implement the silly thing and forget I said anything.

Andrew