p j <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Meaningful TABs in Python is a brilliant language innovation.
Actually the idea goes back to IIRC at least Landau -- but yes python has much nicer syntax than comparable languages. > Python syntax is essentially what lisp's > should be. If you indent lisp in the only standard > readable way, and then take out the parentheses, you > essentially have python-looking code. Not really. Python's syntax only works so well because python is statement based operators have fixed arity and users can't introduce new syntactic constructs -- all not true for lisp and the whitespace based syntax attempts that people have cooked up all look a lot less convincing. > It is a massive productivity boost when editing code that isn't behaving > exactly as you hoped to not have to cursor from bracket to bracket, removing > and adding some, much less (and more importantly) not having to count > whether you have correctly matched 6+ closing brackets. It sounds like you just don't know how to edit lisp code. If you get the hang of it you'll find that it is rather easier (and less error-prone) to perform a lot of editing operations on lisp code than on python code. > What makes lisp such a poor design, is that programmers maintain 2 redundant > syntax formattings. Once with tabs, producing python looking code for > readability, and a duplicate parentheses for the compiler. This is true of C, Java etc. but not of Lisp and scheme where coming up with a whitespace-based syntax would almost certainly involve a number of drawbacks. > The same way that Python "fixed" lisp by removing > redundant parens formatting (fixed defined as > overwhelming market acceptance of Python over Lisp > despite a performance and feature deficit), I think > the syntax change is easy enough to parse by an > interpreter, and much easier to read and write by > programmers. Python is *much* easier to pick up than lisp, for reasons that have mostly nothing to do with parens. 'as ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
