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> tired of closing them This comment misses the point entirely. The point isn't to mitigate having to type them, it's to help keep structural preservation. All
by triclops200 9y ago
> tired of closing them
This comment misses the point entirely. The point isn't to mitigate having to type them, it's to help keep structural preservation. All of these structural editors also do so much more than just close the parens. They allow you to edit the code as the tree it is as well as navigate it as such. Without the parens actually being there, you couldn't do that in a determininistic way, thus the auto-closing of parens is more of a side effect than anything else.
- yvdriess 9y agoIndeed. Or to simplify: - At no point during the editing process do you have an invalid s-expression. - You manipulate the code datastructure, not the code text.
- lispm 9y agoThe feature to navigate/manipulate s-expressions is available in most Lisp text-based editors. That's not a special feature.
- breck 9y agoYou actually don't need parentheses--you can use whitespace. You give up the ability to add N arbitrary trees/nodes to one line, but in return you get beautiful, geometric code that's easier to reason about at scale.