Be gentle with me....

[Neel Krishnaswami]

Samuel A. Falvo II <kc5tja at garnet.armored.net> wrote:
>In article <slrn84r667.1bb.neelk at brick.cswv.com>, Neel Krishnaswami wrote:
>>parenthesized s-exps is why Lisp has a macro system that does not 
>>suck -- Lisp macros are essentially transformations of the abstract 
>>syntax. And that macro system is why even novel ideas can always be
>>expressed cleanly in Lisp.
>
>Forth has much the same capabilities without the use of parentheses.  In
>fact, it uses zero punctuation at all.  :-)

Does every Forth word have a fixed number of arguments? That seems
like the only way it could work.

I have to admit to being a weakling in this regard though: I have
trouble reading pre/post-fix linearizations of syntax trees and
usually end up manually adding parens so I can figure out the
structure.

My brother claims that Forth is a language that basically did the
opposite of Lisp at every design point (eg, no garbage collection,
postfix syntax, close-to-the-metal rather than highly abstract, etc)
and therefore proves by example that Lisp is not the sole right way to
design a language. He goes on to say that he's a bit worried by the
fact that it's the *only* counterexample he has found.... :)


Neel