Subject: Re: Follow up to "New To Lisp: Advantages of Lisp syntax"
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/06/21
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3138961746451885@naggum.no>

* "Jonathan" <jonathan@meanwhile.freeserve.co.uk>
| A few weeks ago I posted a question asking experienced Lisp programmers
| what the advantages of Lisp's (very non-standard) prefix syntax are.

  I'm curious why you still use "standard" about syntaxes.

| You use a lot of parentheses in Lisp, but you can mostly ignore them and
| read by the indenting.  Whereas in C++, where parens are disambiguators,
| you have to read them very carefully.  I've seen this be a major source
| of bugs for people, and it's a major hazard in porting and code
| maintenance (there's no guarantee that even the same vendor will keep the
| same precendence hierarchy forever outside of the relationships defined
| by the ansi standard).

  this is an important observation.  I mused that parens translate to pain
  in Algol-like languages, culminating in C++, and that when people see
  parens in Lisp, they _feel_ the excruciating pain from C++.  now, we are
  not all blessed with growing up with good parens, and psychotic parens
  can have a dramatic effect on one's development, but most people realize
  that it's the _particular_ parens that are good or bad, not all parens.

  welcome to the world of good parens, Jonathan!

#:Erik
-- 
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century