Subject: Re: Future of Lisp From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1995/07/27 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <19950727T192045Z@naggum.no> [John Doner] | On the other hand, mathematics uses different sizes and kinds of | parentheses, and often infix notation, to enhance readability. It's | not hard to make Lisp allow [ ] and { }, although that's not the | standard. yes, programming the lisp reader is quite easy. | Different sizes are out. not really. it only depends on how they are represented. | So is infix notation. all you need is a reader macro that parses a delimited expression and returns a regular prefix form. in fact, one such package exists that allows forms like $ foo * bar + zot $ producing (+ (* foo bar) zot) I don't use it, so forget where you can find it. perhaps somebody else could reiterate that information? | When all the smoke clears, though, I think you're right: Lisp is harder | to read. But not a whole lot harder. And the payoff is that it's easy | to remember, easy to learn, and easy for a program to parse (so it's | easy to write macros). add "easy to write with intelligent editors" (such as Emacs). personally, I find C, a language I used daily for a decade, and still do some stuff in, harder to read, write, and generally deal with than Lisp. I could never remember the precedence rules in C, and when I tried to learn C++, I was literally drowning in syntax and an arbitrary semantic mess. some C++ aficionados think they have a "superior genetic trait" that allows them to deal with C++'s random residue of a syntax disaster. (there was actually a discussion about this on comp.lang.c++.) if so, I hope we find a cure. conversely, it could be that dealing with _elegant_ syntaxes is also a genetically induced preference. now I use Emacs Lisp and Common Lisp almost exclusively, supplanting the many Unix utilities I used to use. when I first saw Perl, my bogometer blew up, and the proverbial mirror broke. it could be that I spend most of my time writing programs that are intended to write programs, and it just so much easier to deal with a fully delimited prefix language. I also work with SGML, and it has similar syntactic properties. #<Erik 3015861644> -- NETSCAPISM /net-'sca-,pi-z*m/ n (1995): habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from the realization that the Internet was built by and for someone else.