Subject: Re: Dangling Closing Parentheses vs. Stacked Closing Parentheses From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 2000/03/29 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3163278794398146@naggum.no> * Dorai Sitaram | Well, the CLISP pretty-printer gives this "semi-dangled" output: : | But if you look closer, you will realize with a jolt that the lparen that | an rparen lines up with is _not_ its matching lparen... someone recently said (sorry, I have been skimming news lately) that he had a problem starting with Lisp because everything was in uppercase -- small things like that can effectively block one's entry into new areas. back when I was fairly new to Lisp (eons and eons ago, of course), I came across CLISP and its unf<beep>ingbelievably braindamaged pretty printer. it was immediately obvious that this had been implemented in a vacuum, free from influence from all knowledgable programmers on the planet and beyond, and it still sucked. to see code printed like this was such a horrible experience I immediately seized upon the source code to try to find out how to turn this gut-wrenching abomination off. but what did I find? the entire source code was formatted like this! aaaaauuugh! and everything in German, to boot. the abyss was staring back at me. <fade> CLISP has since improved. no animals have been hurt in its production. #:Erik