Heya Arne, We're saddened at your unhappiness with the current direction, and glad that you have made a concrete effort at defining a suitable alternative semantics for special indentation extensions.
Currently, however, the consensus seems to be "sweet-expressions will not switch directions, in any way, to use Arne's formulation." As discussed in the other thread, Proposal: ENLIST (Arne's ":"), http://www.mail-archive.com/readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net/msg01066.html , there are some issues which lead us to turn down your two interrelated proposals. Personally, I feel that your combined proposal can be made to work in a language that is restricted to operate in ASCII, or if you have an underlying implementation that reliably uses the same encoding as the programmer. With effort, it can be made to work even with double-width CJK characters and other Unicode nastiness. However, our goal is to develop a general notation that can be applicable across many Lisplike languages. Lisp is easy to implement - the original 'eval' definition was barely a page of text - and it's easy to parse for programs. Hence, the existence of many Lisps. Adding an indentation processor is already a tremendous complication in the parsing, but handling the full generality of Unicode would be an even worse complication (unless you restrict the important parts of the code, or even the entire code, to ASCII). Granted, your approach can be implemented using some sort of preprocessor separate from the core Lisp implementation; in fact, it seems to be defined so that this is easy (hence the need to denote single items with ".") and the preprocessor does not even need to actually understand Lisp syntax (meaning that potentially, a single preprocessor implementation can work with many Lisp implementations - the Lisp implementations just need to implement n-expressions, or even just curly-infix, both of which are far more trivial to add than indentation). This may be considered a point in its favor, although it certainly risks falling into the One True Implementation. We hope you continue to work with or on indentation-based syntaxes for Lisp, whether sweet-expressions, your current proposal, or some other future notation you can develop. Sincerely, AmkG ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_feb _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
