Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Tradition Lisp code formatting
Message-ID: <5016@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 25 Jun 91 20:51:06 GMT
References: <20899@sdcc6.ucsd.edu>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 23

In article <20899@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> sboswell@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (....What Is?....) writes:
>In languages like C, the trend has been to space everything out so
>that blocks are visible (see GNU Emacs "c-mode" to see what I mean,
>if you don't.)  I find it much more readable like that.  But in my
>Lisp books, it seems, comparatively, smashed together!

The essential idea behind Lisp code formatting is to make it
unnecessary to pay attention to individual parentheses when
reading code.  The C-like style that places lots of close
parens alone on a line makes the individual parens more
significant.

Moreover, in C individual parens aren't put along on a line.
It's { and } that are treated that way.  That doesn't work so
well in Lisp, perhaps because parens are used so often and { }
is too close visualy to ( and ).  However, some Lisp programmers
mix ( ) and [ ] in their code, eg:

   (let ([var1 expr1]
         [var2 expr2])
     ...)

-- Jeff