Kartik Agaram:

> 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.

I agree with you.  I started with SRFI-49 because it had a lot of good ideas, 
but using an *alphabetic* symbol for grouping is not (in my view) a good idea.  
So, let's fix that.

> Also, using backslash for any meaning is butt ugly.

Okay, a vote *against* "\".

I don't mind the *look* of backslash, I just worry about its affect on Lisps 
that use slashification.


> > 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.

You can run the iformat.scm on various files to come up with nasties.  It's not 
that group is required in a Turing-complete sort of way; the problem is that 
having lists-of-lists, with complex structures (like code) inside them, is a 
problem when (...) disables indentation.  Obviously, one solution is to enable 
indentation inside (...), but that creates all sorts of backwards-compatibility 
issues, and it's REALLY convenient to be able to *disable* indentation where 
it's not helpful.

--- David A. Wheeler

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