I'm in the pit of despair... er, grading first-year exams, and I'm looking at 
code that has terrible paren-placement issues.  I don't take points off for 
this on exams, but I can only imagine how long it takes these poor kids to get 
their code to run.

After thinking about it for a while, I'm currently of the opinion that one 
serious shortcoming of our syntax is that we fail to distinguish the function 
position from that of the arguments, something that the traditional f(x) 
notation does pretty clearly.

... No, I'm not going to propose changing the syntax. We've got lots of other 
folks doing that.

Who thinks it would be helpful, though, if Check Syntax were to, say, underline 
the function position? In language levels other than beginner this could mean 
overlapping/nested underlines, but that could itself be a warning sign.  If 
there's any interest at all, I could at least do a mock-up to see whether the 
idea grabs people.

John

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