Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!straz From: straz@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Steve Strassmann) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Matching Parens (was Virtues of LISP Syntax?) Message-ID: <3474@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Date: 26 Sep 90 19:22:09 GMT References: <12558@accuvax.nwu.edu> Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA Lines: 28 In-reply-to: lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu's message of 25 Sep 90 22:15:43 GMT From: lynch@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Richard Lynch) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Date: 25 Sep 90 22:15:43 GMT I can read LISP code just fine if "standard" parenthesis rules are used. BUT, when it comes to debugging code known to be faulty, I really hate to try and figure out which parenthesis the ones at the end of a line are coding. The expense of a lot of lines with just right parens is worth the benifit of minimal debugging time to me. Anyone else use this, or am I all alone here? Nothing personal, but I hope you're all alone. If people paid half as much attention to their user interface as they did to their compilers, we wouldn't have to deal with silliness like this. Perhaps you should be using an editor like emacs that comes with some smarts about traditional lisp formatting. For me at least, the indentation of the immediately following line tells me all I need to know about any close-parens. For example, in lisp-mode in many versions of emacs, indents a given line, and indents a given s-expression. Typing a close parenthesis blinks the corresponding open parenthesis. and take you back and forth over a given s-expression so you can see its beginning and end.