4 ms·
I guess that's ironic, but with people coming up used to all the ornate syntax, one of the common balks is "all those parenthesis, it all looks the same" and "t
by lawpoop 11y ago
I guess that's ironic, but with people coming up used to all the ornate syntax, one of the common balks is "all those parenthesis, it all looks the same" and "there is no syntax, how do you read this."
It's like going from Arabic numerals to counting by groups of five; initially, it feels like you're losing expressive power. And, of course, at a glance, you can't read "|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||" as quickly as you can "28".
- kruhft 11y agoHere's a good wiki on the topic: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispLacksVisualCues http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LispLacksVisualCues After a brief period of usage 'the parens disappear' and you just read the code by indentation.
- marssaxman 11y agoSo, uhh... why not use a notation where nesting is expressed via indentation, then? I don't understand how the syntax can be considered superior if the way people actually cope with it is to hide another syntax inside it. I was dumping ASTs as part of a little language project recently and my first impulse was to render them as S-expressions. Alas, it just wasn't readable; I couldn't make any sense of it. Indented YAML style lists, though? The structure pops right out and the information I wanted was immediately obvious. There were no constraints here, I was free to render text in any way that suited me; the Lisp style syntax just wasn't helpful.
- scentoni 11y agoA Lisp with significant indenting (like Python) would bear a strong resemblance to Haskell.