Hacker News Reader

Comment by CooCooCaCha | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of the parenthesis either, but when I learned about s-expressions and how lisp programs are also a data structures that piqued my interest and helped me look past them.

I question people's judgement who can't look past the syntax when there is a very good, and interesting technical reason behind them.

View on HN

Code as data is interesting, but mostly orthogonal to S expressions. For example, Prolog code has the same property without S expressions, and more esoterically TeX (which is succinctly explained to a lisper as programming with defmacro but not defun).

Also raw machine code and XML, even.

Though it's just more powerful in Lisp precisely because the code is just lists in a language designed around working with lists.

So you can actually leverage this property in Lisp without the code becoming inscrutable for it, which in my experience doesn't usually happen in other languages.

> I question people's judgement who can't look past the syntax when there is a very good, and interesting technical reason behind them

The list of things that are interesting is endless, though. I see something I’m turned off by, I move on. There are plenty of valuable things to spend time on.

A-expressions are a choice, and it is fine to argue whether it is a good one. There are plenty of other ways of achieving honiconic syntax.

What's an A-expression? I tried looking it up but didn't find anything.

I have heard of M-expressions but never of an actual implementation. Scheme also seems to have some SRFIs involving alternate syntax that's whitespace dependent, like SRFI 119 (wisp), SRFI 110 (sweet-expressions or T-expressions), or SRFI 49.

A mistype of S-expression that is outside the edit window.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com