I may be way off here and if I am feel free to flame! isn't it true that lisp being an AST transfers the overhead of parsing to humans ? Let me restate that: lisp manages to skip a step that other languages do, i.e. parsing the language to AST ? I understand that it gives you great power but at the same time it comes with its overhead(?). So in essence ruby or python like languages which have very lisp"y" constructs are actually lisp + parsing ?
On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 12:57 PM, ajay gopalakrishnan <ajgop...@gmail.com>wrote: > Precedence is an overrated thing. You dont run into that issue every day. > When we do we have the support of (). So, a developer must have the option > to disambiguate it when necessary, but otherwise should not have to type the > otherwise redundant () all the time. (All this talk is about arithmetic > expressions, so the whole () problem in LISP in general) > Arithmetic expressions are rarely complicated enough to need full > bracketing. And hence, it is better to have a preprocessor that fills in the > required brackets when they are just redundant. > > For e.g. > > (+ (* 1 3) (/ 1 5)) > > It would be better if I could write it as: > > + (* 1 3) (/ 15) > > and the preprocessor should be able to convert it to (+ (* 1 3) (/ 1 5)) > After all, the additional () is what the compiler needs. Not me. Above > simplified version is mathematically unambiguous. > > This is much less noise. > > > On Sun, Dec 20, 2009 at 2:12 AM, Richard Newman <holyg...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> > (< x y) how do you read this literally left-to-right? >> >> I've been writing Common Lisp and Clojure for about 6 years now, and I >> read that "less-than x y" without any confusion. >> >> I have almost no problems with prefix notation; even arithmetic (which >> I was taught in infix for years) rarely trips me up when writing. >> Reading prefix-notation arithmetic is, of course, a joy when compared >> to infix (no trying to remember precedence, building intermediate tree >> nodes in my head, etc.). >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >> Groups "Clojure" group. >> To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com >> Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with >> your first post. >> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to >> clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<clojure%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> >> For more options, visit this group at >> http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Clojure" group. > To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com > Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with > your first post. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<clojure%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
