More specifically, I was referring to design goals for S-expressions:
-- generality: S-expressions should be good at representing arbitrary data. 
 -- readability: it should be easy for someone to examine and understand the 
structure of an S-expression. 
 -- economy: S-expressions should represent data compactly. 
 -- tranportability: S-expressions should be easy to transport over 
communication media (such as email) that are known to be less than perfect. 
 -- flexibility: S-expressions should make it relatively simple to modify and 
extend data structures. 
 -- canonicalization: it should be easy to produce a unique "canonical" form of 
an S-expression, for digital signature purposes. 
 -- efficiency: S-expressions should admit in-memory representations that allow 
efficient processing.

  These are just as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Why change 
something that works?
Dex

> On Jul 22, 2019, at 4:15 PM, Alexis King <lexi.lam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Jul 22, 2019, at 14:16, Dexter Lagan <dexterla...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> A parens-less Racket2 would become Crystal.
> 
> 
> No it won’t. I am quite confident that Racket with any syntax will not be 
> like any other language that currently exists. What other language has 
> Racket’s advanced, robust compile-time metaprogramming support, its 
> higher-order contract system, its #lang mechanism (applied to great effect in 
> technologies like Scribble and Typed Racket), its 
> language-as-an-operating-system support for runtime sandboxing and 
> introspection, and its featureful and extensible FFI, among many other 
> things? To say that Racket is so defined by its syntax that it will cease to 
> be distinguishable from any other language if it is changed is absurd, and 
> it’s frankly insulting to all the people who have put so much effort into 
> every part of Racket.
> 
> If you believe Racket’s syntax is its most important feature, and that 
> everything else that sets it apart from other languages is pragmatically 
> irrelevant, I can’t really argue with that. I disagree, but it’s a matter of 
> opinion. That said, that kind of criticism isn’t very constructive, since I 
> don’t know how to interpret it beyond “I really like parentheses,” which is 
> hardly actionable or debatable.
> 
> I make no claims of representing the will of PLT, so I could be wrong, but I 
> think discussing what about s-expressions you like—and what about other 
> syntaxes you dislike—is on-topic and can produce constructive discussion. But 
> although it’s possible I didn’t read it carefully enough, the link you 
> provided doesn’t seem to have much in the way of that sort of explanation… it 
> seems to focus on how to most usefully take advantage of s-expressions, but 
> it doesn’t compare them to other formats.
> 

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