Comment by evanrmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanrmurphy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would really like to know more about these past proposals for conventional-looking syntax. I already know of a few, including the OP and SRFI 49 [1]. Could you offer any additional reading on the subject?

Some quotes from a different page on the OP's site [2] suggest that even some experienced lispers can see value in conventional syntax:

> I've used Lisp my whole programming life and I still don't find prefix math expressions natural. - Paul Graham

> After 13 years of doing Lisp and 3 or 4 years of Python, I agree: I prefer writing Lisp, but Python is easier to read. - John Wiseman

Personally, I hold no aversion to the parentheses. But I can see some advantages/uses for a more conventional syntax. Also, it's a fun problem. :)

---

[1] http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-49/srfi-49.html

[2] http://www.dwheeler.com/readable/

Shriram Krishnamurthi (author of PLAI http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/) recently suggested one: http://shriram.github.com/p4p/

I've been meaning to go through it in detail, but to be honest I really like s-expressions, really really. I'd even say the regularity of syntax is one of lisp's greatest features (even Clojure's [] and {} literals are going too far for my taste...)

Thanks for that pointer. I never expected Shriram to propose one :) The parens are quite acceptable if you use syntax coloring options in DrRacket to make them light grey, which is what I do. Imo, P4P is just not worth the learning delta .. particularly because it doesn't solve the single biggest readability issue - math expressions - which exists even if you make all parens invisible.

In my company, I came up with one myself (http://code.google.com/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions/wiki/Tab...) when some aesthetic objections arose to the use of (paren (laden (scheme))) as a scripting language for our product. It is quite telling that we ended up not using the tab syntax in the end, though it is still available in the product :D

Just out of curiosity, I created two gists with the P4P examples coded using the tab syntax I mentioned -

tab-syntax version: https://gist.github.com/716416 scheme-syntax version: https://gist.github.com/716417

Reply on news.ycombinator.com