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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: Virtues of Lisp syntax
Message-ID: <3425@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 13 Sep 90 20:56:45 GMT
References: <3368@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1990Sep10.091911.20877@hellgate.utah.edu> <11048@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 46

In article <11048@cadillac.CAD.MCC.COM> ned%cad@MCC.COM (Ned Nowotny) writes:

>In so far as extension languages are concerned, this is the most
>important argument against unsugared Lisp syntax.  Most people
>learned mathematics with infix operators and most people are more
>accustomed to communicating in a written form where keywords and
>separators are the typical delimiters, obviating the need for
>parenthesis or bracket matching.

Um, when's the last time *you* wrote expressions in an infix 
language.  Parentheses and bracket-matching are definitely
involved.  That is, the difference is, to some extent, a
mater of degree.

Of course, you're right that there are more user-friendly syntaxs that
than provided by Lisp, at least if the users are not already familiar
with Lisp.  However, (1) the implementation of a Lisp-based extension
language tends to be simpler and smaller, (2) the result is a proper
programming langauge rather than something more restricted, (3) Lisp
is at least as "friendly" as some of the alternatives such as Post-
Script, (4) experience with a number of implementations of Emacs (eg,
Multics Emacs, GNU Emacs) -- and of other things -- has shown that
users, even "non-programmers", can use Lisp effectively as an
extension language and even find such use pleasant.

>                                  In fact, most users are not
>persuaded by arguments that Lisp syntax is "elegant" or "easy
>to learn."  They are far more likely to believe that the programmer
>was to lazy to build a simple parser and therefore decided, because
>of the obvious intrinsic value of the product, that the user should
>be willing to be the parser for an otherwise unfamiliar notation.

I also think you overestimate the extent to which users will be
comfortable with mathematics and the rigidities imposed by programming
languages in general.  That is, many users will feel they are parsing
an unfamiliar notation regardless.

>This attitude, at best, is not customer-oriented and, in any case,
>is unproductive.  Parsing technology is well developed.  Extension
>languages can fairly easily accommodate an ALGOL-like syntax while
>still providing all the semantics of Lisp (or Scheme, for that
>matter.)

True.

-- JD