I had this thought at work, when I should have been working, so please bear with me if it's nonsense.
One of the things that always puts people off of Lisp, as we all know, are the parentheses. Now, many ways have been suggested of doing this in other Lisps, but have never taken off, mainly due to inertia and a fear of sacrificing homoiconicity. However, I love Clojure, and want to see it really take off. And so I want to see all barriers to that removed. Also, I think the language is young enough that seemingly-but-not-really radical proposals can still be sneaked in. Let's take this example, since I note that Rich Hickey weighed in in the comments: http://www.innoq.com/blog/st/2009/12/clojurelisp_readability.html (apply merge-with + (pmap count-lines (partition-all *batch-size* (line-seq (reader filename))))) This little snippet has ten parentheses. And is potentially very unnerving to a non-lisper. Ten parentheses in four lines seems a lot to most programmers. Rich, in the comments, suggests a pipelined style to make the code more readable: (->> (line-seq (reader filename)) (partition-all *batch-size*) (pmap count-lines) (apply merge-with +)) I accept that this is more readable because it has less nesting. But it now has *12* parentheses, more than the original, potentially just as alarming to the Lispophobes. My question is this: why can't we introduce a simple and importantly, optional 'off-side rule' (much simpler than Haskell's) that allows the reader to infer many of the parentheses? A very simple offside rule could turn the original into: apply merge-with + pmap count-lines partition-all *batch-size* line-seq (reader filename) With a startling two parentheses and Rich's corrected version into: ->> line-seq (reader filename) partition-all *batch-size* pmap count-lines apply merge-with + Also with two. That last example in particular looks splendidly readable. Almost... monadic. The parenthesis inference here is very simple, and could be stated in two sentences: For each line that is not within a vector, and does not have an opening parenthesis, infer an opening parenthesis at the start of the line. Remember the level of indentation, and infer a closing parenthesis at the end of the line *before* the next line whose indentation is the same as or less than the remembered one. My question is: why would such a scheme work/not work, and why would/would not it be desirable? Martin -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
