5 ms·
I think this is the most wonderful part of Lisp. Specifically its homoiconicity, or the fact that the syntax of the program is the program, and yet the syntax (
by whalesalad 5y ago
I think this is the most wonderful part of Lisp. Specifically its homoiconicity, or the fact that the syntax of the program is the program, and yet the syntax (as far as linebreaks, indentation, spaces vs tabs, etc) is completely irrelevant to the meaning of the code.
Ostensibly you could craft a future where what is on disk is not what the user is actually editing - a-la the virtual DOM. And on read/save the developer's preference is used to transform the syntax into their ideal shape. This is trivial in a Lisp, but not so easy in other languages.
- eternauta3k 5y agoIndentation is not the reason why it's hard to autoformat Python code, or any other language for that matter.
- zem 5y agoit's definitely a reason for python. consider: if foo: if bar: do something else: do something else how would you autoindent that?
- squeaky-clean 5y agoYou wouldn't, as that's not a valid python line.
- sockpuppet69 5y ago