At 04:15 PM 10/8/00 -0400, you wrote:

...

I find myself become more of an instant nutcase than testcase when I look at even this trivial example:

(define (area-of-disk r) (* 3.14 (* r r)))

A voice inside my head starts saying "No. Stop no!"

Jason, I've been programming C since 1984, and my reaction is identical to yours. Whatever that thing is, it's not normal C/Python/Perl/fortran syntax, nor is it reverse polish as far as I can see. I cannot *even imagine* how a kid would understand that syntax. Personally, I'd feel much better if it were

I'm a Python user, but I'll try to defend Scheme in this respect, because I really believe in Scheme's beauty. *grin* I think part of what feels weird is the training we have, in both our languages and in math classes, in distinguishing between regular functions, (sin(x), exp(e), ...) and infix operators (+, *, ...). Many languages make this distinction --- Scheme is one of the languages that doesn't. Scheme syntax makes a lot more sense when you consider everything to be a regular function. For example, let's rename the '*' "operator" to a function called 'multiply': (define multiply *) ;; just a renaming (define pi 3.14) ;; another renaming (define (square r) (multiply r r)) ;; for convenience (define (area-of-disk r) (multiply pi (square r)) Also, by not making the math functions as explicitly binary infix operators, it allows one to express: "multiply 2, 3, 4, and 5" as (* 2 3 4 5) which is pretty nice, I think. Hopefully, this makes it a little more explicity that Scheme uniformly treats all functions the same, even the infix math operators.