Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!wb1.cs.cmu.edu!ram
From: ram@wb1.cs.cmu.edu (Rob MacLachlan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Reading Lisp: parens and indentation
Keywords: resistance to lisp
Message-ID: <5172@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 9 Jun 89 16:22:45 GMT
References: <31670@sri-unix.SRI.COM> <469@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1028@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <487@skye.ed.ac.uk> <11917@well.UUCP> <9636@polya.Stanford.EDU> <1044@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <521@skye.ed.ac.uk> <1057@syma.sussex.ac.uk> <526@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 28


Although I am quite happy with Lisp syntax, I believe that predjudice
against Lisp syntax is very real.  I think that this may be a major reason
behind the "ghettoization" of the Lisp community.  I know an experienced
Lisp programmer who was doing some non-lisp-specific work on programming
SIMD processors.  Pursuant to this, he had to design an implement a new
langauge.  He initially used Lisp syntax, since he was comfortable with it,
and it allowed him to use the lisp reader as his parser, but he found it
difficult to get anyone without a Lisp background to read his paper.  He then
modified a parser generator to emit Lisp code, changed his syntax and had a
much better reception.

I do believe that Lisp syntax is initially somewhat harder to comprehend
that more conventional syntaxes, although this might be less of a problem in
a simple teaching subset that omitted warts such as COND.  But I also
suspect that Lisp syntax is something of a local optimum, given the
advantages of easy code manipulation.  The thing is, that the list
representation of Lisp has a moderate similarity to the underlying
semantics.

Modern Lisp compilers have moved away from using lists as the internal
representation for code.  The most important shortcoming of lists is that it
is difficult to annotate a list with the result of any semantic analysis.
It would be useful for users to be able to write "macros" that transformed
these richer intermediate representations, but this is difficult because the
richer representation is harder to comprehend.

  Rob MacLachlan   CMU Common Lisp group
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