3 ms·
10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead, you use minus rather than unde
by neilv 2y ago
10% of the remaining advantage of Scheme today is not needing to use the Shift key to type identifiers on US keyboards. Instead, you use minus rather than underscore, and there's no camel-case, and mostly no all-caps (except for syntax transformer pattern variables, IMHO).
However, Scheme and other Lisps have the problem of parentheses being a shifted character on most US keyboards.
For Scheme, my Emacs tweaks included letting you type the square brackets (unshifted on US keyboard) to get parentheses. (Or you'd get the correctly matching closing character, if the close-square-bracket key you pressed would match an open-square-bracket.)
- dunham 2y agoDonald Knuth has a custom keyboard layout file for macos that switches [] with () and + with =. The file is at https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/DonKeys.keylayout https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs/DonKeys...., linked from https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html
- chuckadams 2y agoR6RS scheme lets you use square brackets equivalently to parentheses.
- neilv 2y agoIf you want uncomfortable pointy corners, sure.
- ryukafalz 2y agoOne of my favorite keyboard layout tweaks is being able to tap left/right shift for open/close parens. How well it works depends on the keyboard but especially on split keyboards it can be very nice.