I've been falling behind as well. I wanted to see if time would reduce
my dislike for GROUP, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Indeed, I
can't even bring myself to do more than skim the discussions about it.
I've struggled to understand/articulate why this is to myself, and
mostly failed. The best I can come up with: making a language
indent-sensitive should never add new syntax. Certainly not syntax
that isn't attached to existing code (like quote, parens, unquote --
or python's colon), and absolutely not a keyword like 'group'. SRFI 49
is utterly wrong-headed about this.
Curly infix adds syntax, but it seems intuitive. Modern exps move
parens around; that's also fine. But a pass that just makes whitespace
sensitive is too complex if it also affects non-whitespace. I think
that will be a non-starter. It is seriously easier to use an existing
mechanism and just wrap the whole thing in parens.
> I'm not sure if it would be a good idea to have [editing functions]
> formally in the source code.
I think your sentiment here is close to my previous paragraph.
Is 'group' really going to be easier to understand than enabling
whitespace-sensitivity inside parens? I think that's a good test if
we've decided the latter is too complex.
Also, using backslash for any meaning is butt ugly.
> About a week ago, as I was thinking about the GROUP issue, I had the idea to
> use an ellipses in the following manner:
>
> let
> ... x 10
> y 12
> {x + y}
Modulo my reservations about group, this is my favorite idea so far.
But it also screams to me that we could just use parens. It might help
the discussion if we always use a complex example that we think
*requires* group.
> Indeed, since no two Lisp variants are strictly compatible with each other,
> trying to come up with a sweet-expression spec that's fully compatible
> between every variant may even be impossible!
Yeah, I agree.
> Arc, if I understand correctly, uses "\" to separate two lists on a line.
Perhaps we're thinking about different Arcs? http://arclanguage.org is
not whitespace sensitive at all. (It does not use backslash --
otherwise I wouldn't be using it :)
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