3 ms·
Gratuitous parenthesis nesting. We see it a lot in Clojure. Nesting boxes instead. It could be represented, in the editor, that way. It could be much more leg
by swayvil 6y ago
Gratuitous parenthesis nesting. We see it a lot in Clojure.
Nesting boxes instead. It could be represented, in the editor, that way.
It could be much more legible.
Is anybody doing that?
- appleflaxen 6y agothey are logically equivalent (of course) and the parentheses become invisible once you are used to them. Every language has a threshold of "fluency" which, once you reach it, makes it easy to understand at a glance. Retooling to use nesting boxes has obvious appeal to a newcomer, but none to an existing programmer, and the cost to the corpus of existing programmers is far too large to justify.
- bitwize 6y agoWork with a Lisp long enough and you don't even see the parens anymore, you just see blonde, brunette, redhead...
- fulafel 6y agoWe see that a lot in other languages too (taking curly braces as parens too). There have been many attempts at languages that separate (or even do away with) the textual representation vs what is shown and interacted with in integrated tooling. Seemingly it has nice properties like forbidding invalid syntax. So far the common textual representation seems to be important enough to win over the AST languages.