Be gentle with me....

[William Tanksley]

On 7 Dec 1999 22:49:43 GMT, Neel Krishnaswami wrote:
>William Tanksley <wtanksle at hawking.armored.net> wrote:

>>Wow.  It took me a few weeks to get over Lisp's parens, and they're WAY
>>nastier than Python's indentation.  A year, though...

>Hey, Lisp's parens are a big part of the reason Lisp is beautiful!

They're also a big part of why it's ugly -- and I speak as a person who's
long ago gotten over the parenthesis-phobia.

>The combination of symbols as a language feature and fully
>parenthesized s-exps is why Lisp has a macro system that does not 
>suck -- Lisp macros are essentially transformations of the abstract 
>syntax. And that macro system is why even novel ideas can always be
>expressed cleanly in Lisp.

Forth does the same thing without punctuation of any kind -- a Forth
program is merely a sequence of words.  Any given word can look ahead in
the input, pull words out, and stuff new words in.  Many words can compile
code as well as modify source.

>Neel

-- 
-William "Billy" Tanksley, in hoc signo hack