On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 10:46:26AM +0200, Dexter Lagan wrote:
> I'm not going over why s-expressions are the way to go, mr. Rivest did it
> best in his 1997 MIT doc:
>
> https://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt
>
> A parens-less Racket2 would become Crystal. And I don't think we need yet
> another functional parens-less language.
Keep S-expressions, but change their syntax.
Nesting parentheses are like recusion.
Create a notation for tail-nested parenthese, kind of like
tail-recursion optimisation, turning that kind of nesting
into something more like iteration.
It's tail-nesting that tends to move indentation far, far to the right
and creates accumulations of hard-to-count close-parenthesis
agglomerations.
My proposal is to pick a currently underused character (I picked '/' 30
years ago but amost anything would do) and use it to replace the
tail-nesting '(', and remove its corresponding ')'.
Suddenly visual parenthesis-matching becomes an order of magnitude
easier, without losing any of the expressiveness and conceptual
significance of S-expressions.
-- hendrik
> We already have Haskell (hard to
> read) and Crystal (weird half-commercial proposition that won't produce
> binaries without major hacks). I say we keep the parens but make them even
> less intrusive.
A notation for tail-nestig accomplishes non-intrusive parens all by
itself.
> Newlisp may be an ugly hack, but its simplified forms and
> anaphoric vars are very nice to use. For example:
>
> http://www.newlisp.org/downloads/newlisp_manual.html#if
With tail-nesting notation, there's no need for the iterated if.
And this if-iteration can be freely interspersed with let's. Also a
common occurrence.
Tail-nesting notation is completely orthogonal to the rest of the
language.
-- hendrik
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