Alpheus Madsen:
> I don't know why, but I've always been bothered by calling s-exprs "ugly";
> it's something that has bothered me ever since I've discovered
> sweet-expressions....
> This isn't to say I don't think that s-expressions are perfect, by any means!
> ...
> Having said that, I can't yet suggest a better word. Maybe "awkward"?
"Awkward' is fine by me. I'll modify the presentation.
> Indeed, I always cringe when I see an inequality, like "(< a 1 b 2 c 3)"--if
> anything makes the case for sweet-expressions, it's that it will become
> possible to say "{3 <= a < 10}" in a short-circuitry sort of way...
Well, sort of. If the comparisons are exactly the SAME on all sides, you can
indeed easily express them like this:
{a < 1 < b < 2 < c < 3}
{3 <= a <= 10}
However, if the comparisons are *different*, such as:
{3 <= a < 10}
You can do this only if you define "nfx" to make it so. Otherwise, the system
has no way of knowing that there's a relationship between <= and <. In fact,
there may not be one (or an obvious one). Although <= and < have a strict
relationship in most of mathematics, comparisons of floating point numbers are
actually rather messy, especially when you ask what "=" means.
That said, if you don't want to define nfx, you can still do this when you vary
the comparison:
{{3 <= a} and {a < 10}}
Which I think is very clear, and is in fact how you would write this in most
programming languages. The "cure" to "fixing" this would be, in my opinion,
far worse than the disease.
--- David A. Wheeler
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