Re: [Readable-discuss] wisp now defaults to activating curly-infix

[Arne B. <arn...@we...>]

Hi David,

Am Dienstag, 18. November 2014, 22:28:11 schrieb David A. Wheeler:
> > It comes down to personal preferences: The weight we give to different
> > aesthetic aspects of programming languages. For me, the syntactic
> > simplicity is one of the main selling points of lisp and scheme, and
> > sweet departs from that by adding more than the absolute minimum of
> > the required syntax elements for creating a general, indentation-based
> > representation of scheme-code.
> 
> Neither Scheme nor Common Lisp are so simple to parse once you
> consider their full generality (e.g., number types).

That hit me with the pure preprocessor… one of the reasons why I
switched to using (read) was that I had some longstanding parsing bugs
for which I did not have obvious fixes.

But that doesn’t mean that the syntax is very complex, just that there
are lots of details to take care of. If you hit # a special form
begins, strings have some escaping, and otherwise there are the
quotes. But maybe my view is a bit biased, because I compare it to
Python, Java and C++. Especially C++ ☺

> > Best wishes,

> You too!  I view this as a friendly competition.
> We both agree that there's a need for a Lisp syntax that is
> general and homoiconic, and that indentation can help.
> We differ on how to best exploit that, that's all.

That’s how I see it, too - and we’re also using similar resources
(like GNU Guile). On the long run I hope that having two different
flavors will help indentation-based syntax for Lisps, because it shows
that it’s not just a personal pet-project but rather something of
broader appeal.

And for example today Mu Lei (Nala Ginrut) had the idea of
representing sxml templates as wisp - a case where I think the sweet
<* *> syntax could come in really handy.

> Thanks.

Thank you! Without you I likely would have never been able to reach
the point where I can actually write wisp code in the REPL and execute
wisp files directly from guile!

It’s crazy to think that nowadays it’s actually possible to do 

     guile -L . --language=wisp tests/factorial.w

and have guile execute the file as real code. 
I guess you know the feeling ☺
- Arne
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