This is the mail archive of the guile@cygnus.com mailing list for the Guile project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: Reader option to permit brackets as parentheses


> Is that what python is? Sounds like a _very_ bad idea to have code
> meaning depending on whitespace.

Why? Whitespace is understandable, obvious, easy to edit, easy to align.
I think that people had this big reaction against whitespace when
they saw Pascal and C as the next big thing that would replace FORTRAN
and they wanted to show that they were cool by allowing whitespace
to be anywhere at all. Since then all they have done is argue over
indentation and pretty printing standards...

> Mike.. Take what I say with a grain of salt. I'm just one voice and one
> opinion. However, in R5RS...
> 
> "The following five characters are reserved for future extensions to the
> language: [ ] { } | "

This implies that these characters cannot be used in normal identifiers
(a good idea anyhow for general sanity) so guile SHOULD spit an error
everytime it encounters ANY of the above characters (except in strings).

> I'd love to know what extensions they have in mind.

I use [] for matricies, I don't do it through the normal guile parser though.

> IMHO the correct way to read lisp is by looking at the indentation. You
> therefore need to write it with a lisp-aware editor which can do this
> for you. The reason people find lisp hard to read is that they havn't
> comprehended this fact. In fact all languages are hard to read without
> correct indentation, but in the case of lisp it is impossible. I can see
> how students may find [] as a method to better help match up parens, but
> maybe that is because they don't understand how to look at the
> indentation? With lisp there is more information in the indentation than
> in the code :-)

Hmmm, yes use indentation for readability, excellent idea. Indentation
really is nice to use. Tell you what, how about using indentation for the
bracketing too and clean up those parens -- that would be even more readable.

	- Tel

Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]