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Re: [Re: Bracket heresies. What about subscripting?]


Michael Vanier <mvanier@bbb.caltech.edu> writes:

> Well, I haven't reached that stage of enlightenment yet, but I'm sure I
> will :-)

First thing is using a real editor, vim, emacs or whatever that
supports a lisp indentation mode.  Read and write your code in that
editor and you will quickly find that the parenthesis do not appear at
all in your mind.  All the information is carried in the indentation.

What is the advantage of this?

Well, it means that humans can process scheme programs easily using
the whitespace around the expressions, the indentation.  At the same
time programs can understand programs better because they have a
simple, uniform syntax.

A scheme function is a list, a scheme program is a list.  You can
generate lists at runtime, you can therefor generate functions and
programs at run time.  This let's you do things that would be very
prohibitive in other languages, such as embed domain-specific
languages in scheme, compile said language into scheme, and second
guess everything that Jim and Michael decided on by extending scheme
however you want.

All you will get from these other syntaxes is other scheme programmers
pissed at you, because they now gotta figure out what all the funky
symbols mean, they can't run your code thru a lisp implementation
without your extensions, and their lisp modes are no damn good for
reading and editing it anymore.

But as I said in another email.  I don't have to read your code, so I
don't care what you use.  But I think you'll miss out on alot of the
power of scheme if you try and sully it's otherwise pristine syntax.

Of course, with guile the idea is to have translators, so do what you
think is neccesarry.

-- 
Craig Brozefsky                         <craig@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software     http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
I say woe unto those who are wise in their own eyes, and yet
imprudent in 'dem outside                            -Sizzla

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