3 ms·
cool experiment, but whitespace is a terrible delineator. ironically one of the most disliked parts of lisp by newcomers, the parens, ends up becoming its great
by whalesalad 4y ago
cool experiment, but whitespace is a terrible delineator. ironically one of the most disliked parts of lisp by newcomers, the parens, ends up becoming its greatest strength once you have grokked things.
- dismantlethesun 4y agoI’m used to whitespace as a delineator thanks to python. If used judiciously it can be a great benefit. I do admit it would be nice if it were optional so you could have more complicated expressions than you can easily write with paired brackets/braces/parentheses.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 4y agoIf used judiciously, it doesn't find its way into a programming language design.
- Phiwise_ 4y agoI'mremindedofthehistoricalobservationthattheRomanswroteandreadlatinwithnospaces,makingCaesaralinguisticgeniusforthefeatofeasilyreadingletterswithoutspeakingoutloud,whenIreadabsolutistcommentsonwhitespacelikethis. Editor fonts which replace spaces and tabs with what are essentially the appropriate periods or similar make this not a merely hypothetical or anachronistic point.
- ArneBab 4y agoYou can do that in wisp: Inside parentheses (and strings), whitespace processing is halted. define : proc display (string-append "foo" "bar" (format #f "foo~a" 2) ) ; is valid wisp (it would be valid wisp without the indentation in the parentheses, but it would look weird) (empty lines added to prevent hn from stripping newlines)
- zackoverflow 4y agoI used to feel the same way, but after learning Haskell I think whitespace is particularly suited for functional programming languages.
- seabrookmx 4y agoWorks well in F# too!