do...until wisdom needed...

[Rainer Deyke]

"Douglas Alan" <nessus at mit.edu> wrote in message
news:lc7kzryeav.fsf at gaffa.mit.edu...
> Regarding the parentheses thing -- I don't know why some people don't
> like that.  I think that if people had an open mind, they would see
> that Lisp's notation has its own beauty.  On the other hand, many
> people don't have an open mind; for instance, many people I've talked
> to summarily dismiss Python merely on the basis that it uses
> whitespace to determine nesting.

I think it has less to do with abstract "beauty" and more with the way the
human brain processes information.  In Python (and to a lesser degree most
other programming languages), the shape of a program gives you a lot of
informtion about its structure.  This is not true in Lisp.  Given a form '(a
b)', you can't even tell if 'b' is evaluated without looking at 'a'.  More
generally, you can't tell if anything is evaluated without looking every
single enclosing form.  This is the result of only having a single
all-purpose syntactic form to express anything and everything.


--
Rainer Deyke (root at rainerdeyke.com)
Shareware computer games           -           http://rainerdeyke.com
"In ihren Reihen zu stehen heisst unter Feinden zu kaempfen" - Abigor