Author: Gareth McCaughan
Date: 14:55:41 02/23/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 23, 2004 at 13:52:47, Christophe Theron wrote:
> From what I see, LISP has a basic "(operator arg arg arg...)" structure
> (correct me if I'm wrong, the last time I looked at LISP was 15 or 20 years
> ago).
...
> But there is something that I find very inelegant: if one is ready to
> give up on the more standard "operator(arg,arg...)" or "arg1 operator arg2"
> (like in "a+b"), then it is possible to do it without the parenthesis!
Yes. But then you lose some useful things.
- You can no longer have optional arguments or keyword arguments.
(Well, more or less. You can do, e.g., something similar to C's
"printf", where one parameter determines how many others to
pop off the stack.)
- The structure of the code is no longer there. You can reconstruct
it, but it isn't *there* in the list structure. That makes writing
macros much, much harder. Macros are one of the major reasons
why Lisp is cool.
For me, the tradeoff is strongly in favour of keeping the parentheses.
My text editor helps me keep them balanced, and I don't find that they
get in the way of my comprehension.
--
g
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