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