The ubiquity of parenthesis has a purpose - it lets you treat code as data. Your argument only makes sense if syntax choice were 100% based on taste. But it's not (simplicity of syntax brings with it practical features), so it's great that some people are exploring other options.
And it's not intrinsically less readable than say, something like: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.6.3/libstdc++/api/a0111...
Are you sure? Plenty of languages[1,2] allow you to treat code as data and they don't need that many parenthesis.
[1] https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/ast.html
[2] https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/inde...
julia> :(a + b*c + 1) ==
Meta.parse("a + b*c + 1") ==
Expr(:call, :+, :a, Expr(:call, :*, :b, :c), 1)
true
I would say: you can execute it, therefore it's code. What am I missing?
> Why not just use a single representation (+ a (* b c) 1) ?
Are you saying you don't like the default print? You can write a println method for type Expr which prints it any way you want. Seems like a miniscule thing to nitpick.
Why wouldn't anyone want to write code like this:
Expr(:call, :+, :a, Expr(:call, :*, :b, :c), 1)You can of course parse code in any language and treat it as data (and it may resemble lisp code!) but it’s not quite the same thing.
>>> parse("2 + 2")
['eval_input', ['testlist', ['test', ['and_test', ['not_test', ['comparison',
['expr', ['xor_expr', ['and_expr', ['shift_expr', ['arith_expr', ['term',
['factor', ['power', ['atom', [2, '2']]]]], [14, '+'], ['term', ['factor',
['power', ['atom', [2, '2']]]]]]]]]]]]]]], [4, ''], [0, '']]
-- Peter Norvig, https://norvig.com/python-lisp.html