Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Alexander Schmolck]

Pascal Bourguignon <spam at thalassa.informatimago.com> writes:

> Alexander Schmolck <a.schmolck at gmx.net> writes:
> I was criticising the graphical aspect on a discrimination stand-point.
> 
> For example, the difference between the latin glyphs for "ka" and "ga"
> is bigger than that between the corresponding kana glyphs.

Hear, hear: a lisper arguing for trading off simplicity, extensibility[1] and
regularity for discriminatability :)

Maybe someone more proficient in Japanese might want to correct me, but I
really suspect it isn't worth it, actually. I don't think the heightened
discrimnatibility is needed that much and in fact would often even be
detrimental because a certain semantic compound often changes from
unvoiced to voiced (or from "big" to "little" TSU) in a fairly regular manner
in compound words (e.g. TETSU
(iron); 鉄；てつ and HAN 板；はん(plate, inter alia) -> 
TEPPAN, 鉄板； てっぱん'iron plate/teppan cooking'; 
there is no TETSUHAN to confuse it with, AFAIK, so the fact that the
similarity between compound and parts is retained in the kana (unlike the
romanji transliteration) is likely to be rather desirable).

'as

[hmm, never tried embedding japanese characters in usenet posting, hope it
works :|]



[1] yep, I mean it: katakana have actually be straighforwardly extended
    relatively recently to provide better transliterations for (mainly
    English) loan words.