Alan Manuel Gloria:
> I've been reviewing the ancient records (LOL was most of
> sweet-expressions decided just last year? (^_^)v)
>
> So, this is just a recap of why the current sweet-expressions looks
> the way it currently does.
This is a nice (and humorous!) summary. Lots of in-jokes, so new
readers may find this a challenge, but
it is interesting to see the sequence.
> As a complete and utterly gratuitous non-sequitur, I prefer (^.^)
> smilies to :-) smilies because the () pair up in the former.
A reasonable issue when discussing Lisps!
It may be a regional thing too. David Crystal's "The Story of English
in 100 Words", page 242, illustrates "cultural differences in the
use of emoticons. In Western countries, emoticons are viewed sideways
and focus on the mouth; in the East, they are horizontal and focus on the eyes".
The table begins with this first entry:
West East
Smile :) ^.^
> 1. David A. Wheeler started with indentation semantics in general
> (i.e. deduce parens from indent)
Actually, there was a "0": David searched for every effort ever done to
make Lisps easier to read.
> 4. List goes on hiatus as secondary participants move on, and David
> (apparently) goes on a PhD-hunting spree and incidentally proves for
> some reason that compiling things twice using open-source compilers
> prevents some guy named ken from adding backdoors to every system on
> the planet.
I did include sweet-expressions (of the time) in my PhD dissertation, BTW.
> 24. almkglor starts enjoying SUBLIST after finding that its limited,
> simple semantics give surprisingly powerful expressive power. During
> all this time, there are several tangential and not-so-tangential
> discussions on the list, mostly about other Lisp-like languages.
Although you tend to use SUBLIST more than I do, I completely agree,
its simple semantics have surprising expressive power.
In general, I want to have very few constructs, each of which are simple and
powerful.
My worry about adding an ENLIST at this point is that, unless there's a strong
use case, I don't want to add MORE stuff. But let's look at a real proposal
(as you've separately posted) and see where it goes.
--- David A. Wheeler
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