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Comment by dualogy | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. Well. Also known as "in the end, everything is just an abstract syntax tree". But while a few people will always delight and excel in reading and writing everything as s-expressions, many of us will probably always find either line-breaks or different kinds of braces, brackets and little syntactic doodads make for easier and saner writing and reading -- even if the parser needs to do a bit more work.

No matter what kind of code I'm looking at: "could I express this as s-expressions?" Sure. "Would I want to?" Hell no.

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> "could I express this as s-expressions?" Sure. "Would I want to?" Hell no.

Of course it is possible to implement syntactic sugar in Lisp which supports JSON style expressions. DSLs are common in Lisp, and that actually became a weakness of Lisp (so-called "DSL hell").

The interesting thing about s-expr is that Lisp doesn't need special data conversion tools to handle them. Even control structures are expressed as s-expr, and they can be created and modified dynamically which means that even code can be exchanged at runtime on the fly.

This is one of the most attractive things of lisp. The fact that the language has no notion of compiletime, evaltime and runtime. The user just doesnt have to care abouut it. Very powerful

Everyone says that, but the thing I loved most about dabbling in elisp was how much nicer things become when your text editor works at the s-expression level. Moving around and manipulating a lisp program is just plain easier than it is in nearly any other language.

This actually isn't true for Common Lisp.

There is a distinction between reader macros and compiler macros, for example, which is relevant for allowing using special syntax be optional for end users.

Certain things also need to be defined if you want them to be available in the compile-time environment. And, sometimes you have to do a bit of extra work if you want to have literal objects in your compilation environment and pass them to runtime.

Check out http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_bc.... though it will probably take you a few readings to make sense of it; I know it did for me.

But for the most part things happen automatically.

> easier and saner writing

No. Just no. I could agree about reading, but writing is much easier with s-exps. There's just less symbols to type. And remember, you still can put newlines and indent however you want.

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