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From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: Dangling Closing Parentheses vs. Stacked Closing Parentheses
Date: 2000/03/28
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* Charles Hixson
| Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis.  I believe that there used to be a
| dialect of Lisp where one could signal "close all parenthesis back to the
| root" by using a ] character, but that seems to have disappeared.  I
| guess that it may have been a bit error prone.

* Pierre R. Mai
| It turned out that this functionality belongs in the editor, and not the
| language.  That's why ] will close all outstanding parentheses in many
| Lisp modes.  This way you get the benefits, without the trouble.  ...

  for what it's worth, I have found it significantly easier to write code
  in Emacs with M-( and M-) rather than ( and ).  I guess I picked up that
  habit when I wrote an SGML-mode that automatized the matching between
  start- and end-tags and inserted every character of the element name in
  _both_ the start- and the end-tag.  I generalized this to let, e.g., M-*
  produce ** with the cursor between them, and applied it to "", `', {},
  [], <>, «», ¡!, ¿?, and for that old Common Lisp reader, ||, as well as
  comments with #||#.  in my view, it's a serious mistake to use paired
  delimiters of any kind in a language without _actively_ supporting their
  paired entry when writing.

#:Erik