I am interested in exploring Lisp before too long. However, I
have a physical problem with the parentheses. My nystagmus
means that just outside the subitizing range my time to count
parentheses increases dramatically. According to wikipedia
it should increase at roughly 100ms below 4 and 250 milliseconds for
every item above 4. So this code from Wikipedia:
(defun factorial (n)
(if (<= n 1)
1
(* n (factorial (- n 1)))))
should mean it takes about 650ms for someone to see there are 5
close parentheses at the end. It takes me about 3 seconds of
concious effort to reach that number. Moving the cursor over them
is one option, but it is slower. I think another might be if I can
find a font and a means of displaying it which slightly disturbs the
spacing, position or shape of successive parentheses, so the pattern is
irregular. Then when the characters appear to "move about" for me I
won't mix them up and come to a wrong count. I'm thinking of the
way text used to be just a bit wobbly with the line printers of the
1980's.
Given my preferred editor is Vim, and I'm using it on Windows, mostly
with PuTTY talking to a Unix box, does anyone know if I can do this?
Maybe there's another solution?
Thank you
Hugh
