3 ms·
This is one of the cases where you actually do want Lisp-style s-expressions, because they don't need any real parsing; functionally speaking, they are already
by kibwen 3y ago
This is one of the cases where you actually do want Lisp-style s-expressions, because they don't need any real parsing; functionally speaking, they are already the AST. (This is why you sometimes hear people saying that Lisp "doesn't have syntax".)
- patrec 3y agoExactly. And if you are paren-phobic, you could also have a look at Postscript, Forth or even Smalltalk/Self -- the last two are about the most minimal you can get with infix operators (but no precedence) and "keyword-arguments" (sort of), well, unless you want to go all-in on infix, and do APL.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago> This is why you sometimes hear people saying that Lisp "doesn't have syntax". The other reason is that a language like Common Lisp is defined in terms of the data-structures used by the language and the language has no unique text representation: the “default” reader uses a slightly extended version of s-expressions, but any data structure in the language can be evaluated and any transform from text to data structures can be a textual syntax for Common Lisp.