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Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

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Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#31

Post by mahmud »

coliveira wrote: post #30
JulianMorrison wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light gray, then ;-P Srsly, looking past the brackets is the least problem in reading lisp. The harder part is dealing with the lack of syntax, so you have to remember place structures instead of picking up hints from the punctuation. And in that regard, Pythonic indenting makes it harder .

Some IDEs (Alegro CL, cusp eclipse) display the arguments for all known forms and functions.

s/some/all/g

Nearly every Lisp development environment does that. SLIME, the poster child of excess does this as well. I don't think I matched parenthesis, indented or looked up a documentation since 2005.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#32

Post by JulianMorrison »

coliveira wrote: post #30
JulianMorrison wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Light gray, then ;-P Srsly, looking past the brackets is the least problem in reading lisp. The harder part is dealing with the lack of syntax, so you have to remember place structures instead of picking up hints from the punctuation. And in that regard, Pythonic indenting makes it harder .

Some IDEs (Alegro CL, cusp eclipse) display the arguments for all known forms and functions.

Doesn't help you if what you are trying to do is read code, rather than write it.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#34

Post by jamesbritt »

DrJokepu wrote: post #11
olliesaunders wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are people up-voting this? This is a recipe for bugs.

I think (hope) that it was meant to be funny as opposed to being a serious advice.

I've done this with Ruby and set the color to light gray. My co-workers wanted to have C/Java-style parens around damn near everything (except when they didn't; the reasoning to omit them was something along the lines of, "But, see, here it's a DSL." )

They strike me as line noise and make it harder to read many things, so I lightened up the color in my vim syntax files to give the appearance of more white space.

I had mixed results. Yes, it was far more readable to me, but there were times when a paren was missing or mistakenly added, or the spacing was off (another coding standard violation), and so on.

Now that I code on my own, the new coding standards say no parens unless required by the language. I also changed my syntax coloring back to more clearly show parens.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#35

Post by DrJokepu »

jamesbritt wrote: post #34
DrJokepu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think (hope) that it was meant to be funny as opposed to being a serious advice.

I've done this with Ruby and set the color to light gray. My co-workers wanted to have C/Java-style parens around damn near everything (except when they didn't; the reasoning to omit them was something along the lines of, "But, see, here it's a DSL." ) They strike me as line noise and make it harder to read many things, so I lightened up the color in my vim syntax files to give the appearance of more white space. I h…

Heated debates amongst programmers (coworkers) about marginally important questions such as indenting styles, parenthesis usage, naming conventions, source code directory structure, etc. are always very amusing to observe. I usually sit back and just watch the show.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#36

Post by kingkongrevenge »

kraemate wrote: post #24

Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.

> the perfect way of representing the syntax trees

Humans don't think in syntax trees.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#37

Post by abstractbill »

kraemate wrote: post #24

Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.

No, you're not the only one. Often when writing code in other languages I think in Lisp, and then translate.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#38

Post by snprbob86 »

jacquesm wrote: post #27
stcredzero wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cut&paste simply does not work in the python world and it is much poorer because of that. I think that might have made it much better ! http://perldesignpatterns.com/?CutAndPasteProgramming

Especially while learning a new language cut & paste is a pretty good way to get function definitions from the the tutorial into the interpreter. Having to re-type a bunch of stuff that is already in a computer makes me feel like it is 1978 again.

Cut and paste is a good way to get the definitions from the tutorial into the interpreter without reading them.

Personally, I've only ever had a problem copy-pasting from the web. Even then, it is rare; a mild occasional annoyance well worth the price of the clutter free syntax.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#39

Post by rbanffy »

kingkongrevenge wrote: post #36
kraemate wrote: post #24

Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.

> the perfect way of representing the syntax trees Humans don't think in syntax trees.

Most humans don't. Some do.

Re: Lisp without parentheses: Lisp INdented

#40

Post by kwantam »

kraemate wrote: post #24

Am i the only one who likes lisp because of the parenthesis and the lack of syntax? The parens are the perfect way of representing the syntax trees, and you dont have to be bothered with remembering all the syntax and operators etc like with the other languages.

No, definitely not. I agree with you 100%.

The claim that somehow this retains all qualities of Lisp is absolutely ridiculous. The single most important property of Lisp is that programs are lists, i.e., code==data. "Indented" lisp breaks this.

I'm not intending to troll when I say that people who don't like the parens just don't "get it."

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