That is, parentheses would be completely and totally optional, but could be included to help readability of code, with the compiler ensuring that they are not actively misleading but rather accurately represent the structure of the code.
Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️'s Post
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Cassandra Granade 🏳️⚧️
In response to this postBasically, I personally find Lisp hard to read because all parentheses appear the same way, even though the semantic importance of said parentheses are not always equal. If there's a principled way to make parentheses optional but useful and correct when present, that could be really neat.
@xgranade I once started working on a Lisp preprocessor that let you write in indented (Python-ish) style, and compiled to parentheses. You could still use the parentheses yourself if you like.
Didn’t get too far but I still think it’s a decent idea.
Is that also kind of what you’re describing, or am I missing something?
I can see an alternative approach that would use knowledge of the symbols to decide what to do, but that would require types, and likely preclude variable arguments.
by samir, hibernating ;
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