On Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 3:17 AM, David A. Wheeler <dwhee...@dwheeler.com> wrote:
> I think we need to seriously discuss all the splicing/grouping/etc. stuff.
> Those decisions will affect everything else, and there are complex
> trade-offs. One challenge is that practically any character or character
> pair seems to be already used by someone.
>
>
>> proposal 3:
>>
>> 3. . = SPLICE = GROUP, remove SPLICE-at-the-eol rule (this helps
>> justify removing the SPLICE-at-the-eol: since \ at the eol has an
>> existing meaning in other languages, we avoid it. Incidentally, "."
>> has a meaning in general western written languages: it ends sentences.
>> So we could justify using it to mean "end the expression so far and
>> start a new expression", which is one interpretation of the
>> SPLICE-inline rule.)
>
> Claiming "." as the "end of expression" is an interesting idea, but I don't
> think it is a good idea for Lisps. The problem is that "." already has a
> (very old) meaning; it precedes the cdr of a pair. E.G., (a . b). In cases
> where it makes sense, it'd be wise for the same operator to have the same
> meaning, or it's pretty confusing.
>
> I would expect during indentation processing that:
> a . b
> would mean the same as:
> (a . b)
>
> Thus, I don't think the following works well:
>> foo
>> :foo-stuff . exp1()
>> :bar-stuff . call the function
> because I think a reader would expect this to mean:
> (foo (:foo-stuff . (exp1)) (:bar-stuff . call...))
>
> I don't know of a Lisp spec that defines (. stuff), but interestingly, in
> practice, that usually evaluates (in the reader) as just "stuff" because of
> the way that the Lisp readers are interpreted. I'm fine with mandating that,
> if that helps; it creates an escape we can use.
>
> So I don't like the idea of "." as "splice"; I think it's too confusing.
Okay, so what symbol should we use as splice/group? Candidates
\ = often means "continue on next line" when at eol in other languages
. = means dotted pair in normal Lisps
@ = could conflict with (!!) autoconf-standard replacement (and
de-facto standard when replacing autodetected stuff into files),
conflicts with Guile 2.0 module-access syntax
~ = mostly unused except in Arc, where ~foo means "the function foo
with its output notted" and ~ means "the not function"; otherwise
valid function name
^ = otherwise valid function name (superscript? even infix
exponentiation or XOR operator: {a ^ b})
>
>> let
>> .
>> a b
>> c d
>> e
>
> This one doesn't look bad; claiming that "." on a line by itself as a special
> case seems plausible. I'm still worried that "." is too hard to see, but it
> *is* plausible as a "group" marker.
Yes, but particular specifications of SPLICE make SPLICE-by-itself act
in the same manner as a "group" marker like the above - so I'd rather
merge their meanings to reduce the number of special syntaxes that we
need to spec out.
In short, SPLICE-by-itself should just "drop out" of the rules for
SPLICE-inline and SPLICE-at-the-start.
Sincerely,
AmkG
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