Let's try to use wishful thinking in order to reinvent how to make lisp
more accessible and useful to complete newbies.
My idea is that by converting lisp into a simplified abstract syntax tree
form, and then performing formatting options on that abstract syntax tree
(such as prefixing parts of it
If all lisp functions can be defined or redefined by the user,
then in order to make using those lisp functions readable to an editor in
the end, the functions would need to be designed with extra functions that
serve as in-line comments to their arguments
for example, wrapping a then() and else()
Here is my new idea for an ideal lisp authoring format, which relies on an
html/css/js editor using pretty components around source lisp code. Source
lisp code is still saved as a text file, but is, upon loading into this
theoretical editor, "pretty formatted" as shown in the image below.
Inside t
; is on the same column, and is actual
code
'n* opens, then 'factorial' opens, then 'n-1' opens, from left to right,
and they all close at the end of the table, but before the 'if'.
The goal of doing it this way is to prevent excessive nesting of cells -
and use
I went to great pains to explain that what symbols mean would have to be
explained by the symbol/function creator in a comment inside the
symbol/function definition. The editor would pull the explanation from that
comment. The comment would have some identifier, such as "Usage:" or
"Tooltip:" to pr
