From: Tayssir John Gabbour
Subject: Re: E. W. Dijkstra VS. John McCarthy. A rebuttal to Paul Graham's web writings.
Date:
Message-ID: <cgdf5v$li7@odah37.prod.google.com>
·······@Yahoo.Com wrote:
> > From: "Tayssir John Gabbour" <···········@yahoo.com>
> > In the old days, people apparently had the most amusing notions of
> > lisp, and one big point was no one could possibly work with
> > parenthetical syntax. Of course now we see that HTML/XML has been
> > adopted en masse by the public.
>
> One big disadvantage of parenthetical notation is that if you have a
> very very large expression, like many pages, you can't see where the
> parens match, and if you are using a plain-text editor and get a
> mismatch it's nearly impossible to figure out what's wrong.
Hmm, there are some solutions which come to mind, though you might know
reasons precluding them.
- Use comments to break things up visually, including things like
BEGIN..END <operator name> comments.
- Many huge single expressions are regular, like a big state machine or
something. So in these situations, other visual qualities would
delineate text.
- Progn!
Does this disadvantage hold true for {}, or only () and <>? If the
latter:
- An indentation style similar to a {}; language can be adopted.
Maybe I don't completely understand the context of this. Are we
assuming either text markup or code specific? Or is this a more general
thing encompassing both, among others?
Anyway, it's perfectly possible I've only been exposed to pretty
codebases where things are at most 10-liners, so I'm certainly curious.
MfG,
Tayssir