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Scheme has to fall somewhere between Smalltalk and Forth for quantity of syntax too. To me, these are the prettiest languages.
by excessive 7y ago
Scheme has to fall somewhere between Smalltalk and Forth for quantity of syntax too. To me, these are the prettiest languages.
- masklinn 7y agoI didn't mention lisps because I'm never sure how to classify "built-in" special forms: should they be considered normal names and thus omitted from a syntactic overview or should they be considered keywords and included? On the one hand they usually have non-normal evaluation and custom mini-languages, on the other so do most macros otherwise you'd just use a function. But yeah, these are the sort of languages I think of as "simple": small languages which reach "smallness" by giving access to a limited set of extremely powerful constructs.
- excessive 7y agoYes, and I'm not sure the R*RS standards even specify which special forms are fundamental vs implemented by macros. However, Smalltalk has some keywords too. In any case, it could be a concise cheat sheet.
- masklinn 7y ago> However, Smalltalk has some keywords too. Indeed but they're all on the postcard above (true, false, nil, super and self). Smalltalk's closest thing to built-in special forms would be primitives but they have a generic "shape" and they're pretty much always used as implementation details for the "normal" messages which system users interact with.
- arnsholt 7y ago> small languages which reach "smallness" by giving access to a limited set of extremely powerful constructs That's one of the things I really loved when working in Smalltalk: the language gives you all of the building blocks necessary to build more or less then entire standard library, which makes it extremely simple to implement custom control structures for your application. That, and the fact that you're programming directly in your running application of course.