Parentheses are also just a typesetting convention. You should be able to mouse over and have them replaced by concentric boxes or something. Even whitespace.

Parentheses are also just a typesetting convention. You should be able to mouse over and have them replaced by concentric boxes or something. Even whitespace. Look at how easy this: 4 + [–1(–2 – 1)]2 is to parse this way: 4 + –1 * –2–1 ^2 (especially imagine appropriate light-grey concentric boxes) This is a LISP expression: (LIST 'PLUS (DIFF (CADR EXPR) X) (CADDR EXPR) X)) Here it is with whitespace instead of parantheses: LIST 'PLUS DIFF CADR EXPR X CADDR EXPR X) and as you can see there's an extra parantheses closing something I hadn't quoted. (I have nothing to match it with.) Likewise font size, exact character placement vertically, visual cues, color (more deeply nested = redshift) can all make it super-easy to instantly parse things. Instead the computer gets it instantly (super-easy to parse nested parantheses for the computer) but doesn't convey that to us at a glance at all.