Re: [Readable-discuss] wisp and readable - common expressions

[David A. W. <dwh...@dw...>]

It is obviously possible to change the semantics of leading period.  I am hesitant to add yet another operator; you may disagree but I really tried to make it a short list.  I also really wanted to fix the notation, but leading period is basically never used so that is probably not really a problem.

Let me think about it.

On November 21, 2014 4:38:13 PM EST, Arne Babenhauserheide <arn...@we...> wrote:
>Am Mittwoch, 19. November 2014, 18:34:25 schrieb David A. Wheeler:
>> It's possible to write code that is interpreted *identically*
>> on both wisp and sweet when indentation is enabled.
>
>That’s cool!
>
>> In sweet, a "." at the
>> beginning of a line post-indent is basically ignored.
>
>Would it be possible to generalize this, so sweet would also make the
>full line a continuation instead of only ignoring the dot?
>
>That would make many uses of \\ unnecessary, and wisp would then be
>almost a subset of sweet.
>
>> Thus, in both sweet and wisp:
>> a b c
>>   d e
>>   . f
>>   g h
>> becomes:
>> (a b c
>>   (d e)
>>   f
>>   (g h))
>
>> If wisp interpreted neoteric-expressions by default,
>> then many more expressions work in both systems, e.g.:
>> defun factorial()
>>   if {n <= 1}
>>   . 1
>>   {n * factorial{n - 1}}
>
>That’s true, but then lines with a single element would be treated
>differently than lines with multiple elements, and that is a gotcha I
>want to avoid.
>
>It hits you with things like newline
>
>wisp:
>    define : hello
>      display "Hello World!"
>      newline
>    define : hello2 who
>      format #t "Hello ~A!\n" who
>    hello2 "wisp"
>
>sweet:
>    define hello()
>      display "Hello World!"
>      newline()
>    hello()
>    define hello(who)
>      format #t "Hello ~A!\n" who
>    hello2 "sweet"
>    ; or
>    hello2("sweet")
>
>> So while neoteric-expressions provide two ways to write something,
>> in practice, there's a "more readable" way that better expresses the
>purpose
>> in each case.
>
>It’s almost as if you had intentionally motivated a quote I found
>yesterday but didn’t share because I didn’t know whether it would come
>off as offensive. With that kind of (unintentional?) prep-work:
>
>
>     wisp-expressions are not as sweet as readable, but they KISS.
>
>
>:-)
>
>Best wishes,
>Arne

--- David A.Wheeler