3 ms·
I kinda like the idea but... As as been pointed out, it's pretty much a Lisp where parenthesis have been replaced by whitespaces. The problem is: you need syn
by martinced 14y ago
I kinda like the idea but...
As as been pointed out, it's pretty much a Lisp where parenthesis have been replaced by whitespaces.
The problem is: you need syntactically aware editors to work with such a thing. You probably need a fully structural text editor (a semi-structural editor, not unlike Emacs' paredit, may not be enough)...
Because how do you cut&paste between different levels of indentation?
Worse: how do you cut & paste inside an incomplete AST ?
Sometimes it's the programmer who knows what he wants to do, and here he better be helped with structural text editing or it looks like things could quickly go apeshit.
I understand parenthesitis and Lisp-hatred is high on HN but you need to know that a lot of people who do not hate parentheses are using things such a semi-structural text editing (which, amongst other, allows to automagically match parentheses).
So it's not by saying: "zomg, parenthesis, I hate these. Look here ma', no parentheses... But you'll have one heck of a time aligning code blocks" that you're going to convince Lisp users...
- chrisdone 14y agoIt's not a hatred of parentheses. I use Elisp and Common Lisp all the time, I'm fine with parentheses. If you read the article it's specifically about having liberated macros, something you can't have in the presence of parens. You can't write these macros in Lisp: -- Hello,World! =) print : Hello, World! :-) let x = 23/6²* z/+84 That's "--" and ":" and "=". Those are macros. Cutting and pasting is easy: If I copy foo bar mu zot bob <-- these two bil <-- lines and then I got to here bar zot bob dod rob | <-- with my cursor here and paste what do you expect to happen? Whereas here bar zot bob dod rob | <-- with my cursor here and paste what do you expect to happen? This is trivial to do in Emacs.