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Interesting but surely Arc' is less succinct since succinctness is brevity and clarity and the extraneous bracketing reduces clarity?

• dfranke 19y ago
  > succinctness is brevity and clarity Which is it? Those are two very different things. > extraneous bracketing reduces clarity I'd argue that clarity is increased. It makes it easier to tell what open paren matches what closing paren.
  • derefr 19y ago
    > Which is it? It is power, of a sort: brevity (voltage) multiplied by clarity (amperage). The clarity, however, is not clarity of the syntax, but of the resulting AST. Assuming that the AST is such that every construct in the code is encoded somehow in the resulting transformation to the AST (otherwise the differences would just be artifacts of implementation), it would require two kinds of blocks: (parenthetical-form ...) and (brace-form ...). If these evaluate the same, and are semantically equivalent, in all cases, this is definitely less clear.
    • bayareaguy 19y ago
      Two problems with this electric analogy are a) Voltage and current are related by I=V/R (which I guess you could also express as (let ((I (/ V R))) I)) and b) Brevity and clarity are closer to the ideas of resistance and/or impedance. The shorter and more precise the language, the less it prevents the problem from being solved.