6 ms·

Interesting. Did you encounter any trade-offs or downsides in choosing this over a traditional s-expression style lisp? I am curious why this hasn’t been seen i

Interesting. Did you encounter any trade-offs or downsides in choosing this over a traditional s-expression style lisp? I am curious why this hasn’t been seen in a mainstream lisp before.

wgoodall01 5y ago
This has been seen in a mainstream lisp before! (sort of) Wolfram Language uses almost this exact syntax—function application looks like f[x,y], but in all other respects, it works like a LISP would.
djedr 5y ago
> Did you encounter any trade-offs or downsides in choosing this over a traditional s-expression style lisp? No downsides for `f[x]` instead of `(f x)`. It really does fix the problem of overnesting without any significant trade-off that I can see. Net value of this improvement is the highest. For `foo | bar` instead of `foo[bar]` I see some downsides from a minimalist point of view. Slight complexity is added to the parser. The `|` is right-associative which has to be kept in mind when reading the code: foo | bar | baz might be less clear/more difficult to grasp for somebody who is learning the language than: foo[bar[baz]] As for the zero-argument sugar `foo!` -- its value is marginal, so also might not be worth it from a minimalist point of view. > I am curious why this hasn’t been seen in a mainstream lisp before. Not sure. Certainly I have not seen this exact improvement anywhere before or since. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition. Somehow S-expressions stuck as the defining feature of Lisp and a fundamental ALGOL-like change like that would be too much to stay in the family, certainly not in the mainstream. Indeed, as @wgoodall01 mentions there is the Wolfram Language based around something similar to M-expressions, but it is neither mainstream nor (classified as) a Lisp. The syntax is also more complex overall. There is also Rebol[0] and its variants, but it is also not mainstream and diverges from Lisp substantially. Nothing else of note comes to mind. I think John McCarthy had the right idea with M-expressions. Perhaps the definition should have been a bit more minimal back then and today we would have a major Lisp with this sort of syntax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol

Interesting. Did you encounter any trade-offs or downsides in choosing this over a traditional s-expression style lisp? I am curious why this hasn’t been seen in a mainstream lisp before.

wgoodall01 5y ago

This has been seen in a mainstream lisp before! (sort of) Wolfram Language uses almost this exact syntax—function application looks like f[x,y], but in all other respects, it works like a LISP would.

djedr 5y ago

> Did you encounter any trade-offs or downsides in choosing this over a traditional s-expression style lisp? No downsides for `f[x]` instead of `(f x)`. It really does fix the problem of overnesting without any significant trade-off that I can see. Net value of this improvement is the highest. For `foo | bar` instead of `foo[bar]` I see some downsides from a minimalist point of view. Slight complexity is added to the parser. The `|` is right-associative which has to be kept in mind when reading the code: foo | bar | baz might be less clear/more difficult to grasp for somebody who is learning the language than: foo[bar[baz]] As for the zero-argument sugar `foo!` -- its value is marginal, so also might not be worth it from a minimalist point of view. > I am curious why this hasn’t been seen in a mainstream lisp before. Not sure. Certainly I have not seen this exact improvement anywhere before or since. I think it's mostly a matter of tradition. Somehow S-expressions stuck as the defining feature of Lisp and a fundamental ALGOL-like change like that would be too much to stay in the family, certainly not in the mainstream. Indeed, as @wgoodall01 mentions there is the Wolfram Language based around something similar to M-expressions, but it is neither mainstream nor (classified as) a Lisp. The syntax is also more complex overall. There is also Rebol[0] and its variants, but it is also not mainstream and diverges from Lisp substantially. Nothing else of note comes to mind. I think John McCarthy had the right idea with M-expressions. Perhaps the definition should have been a bit more minimal back then and today we would have a major Lisp with this sort of syntax. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebol