On Sun, 02 May 2010 13:06:56 +1000
Alex Osborne <a...@meshy.org> wrote:
> e <evier...@gmail.com> writes:
> > Can you imagine how disruptive it would be at this point to do it the
> > other way around? If you were starting out today without any Lisp
> > baggage, it seems TOTALLY obvious to me that lists would have been (1
> > 2 3), and the *calling of a function* would have been the different
> > thing ... now that these other data structures represent themselves
> > symbolically (vectors, sets, maps).
> Interesting, although in the case of idiomatic Clojure it's actually
> very rare to want to use a list literal. Most of the places you'd use a
> list literal in other lisps, a vector probably makes more sense in
> Clojure.
That was my conclusion as well - pragmatically, you want the shorter
construct for the more common use case.
> I'm also not sure the code-is-data thing works so well when
> you reverse quotation like that as it means you'd have quotes on every
> nested level instead of just the outside, which would make macros more
> difficult to write (at least without any other changes), but I may be
> misunderstanding your idea.
I thought that as first, but then realized that you'd still want quote
even if you had this change, because quote is more than just a
symbolic representation of the list. It stops the evaluation of the
contents of the list, which the other symbolic representations don't
do. So [1 2 3 (print :hello)] will print the keyword :hello, then
return [1 2 3 nil], but '(1 2 3 (print :hello)) doesn't print
anything, and returns a list with four elements - 1, 2, 3 and the list
with two elements, the symbol print and the keyword :hello. This
should be compared with '[1 2 3 (print :hello)].
To get behavior similar to the vector constructs, you want to use
list, which works like vector, except returning a list instead of a
vector: (list 1 2 3 (print :hello)). It seems that what's missing here
is a syntax for (list. I'm not sure it's needed, as it never appeared
in LISP, but #[ seems to be the logical candidate:
{ - hash-map #{ - hash-set [ - vector #[ - list
<mike
--
Mike Meyer <m...@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.
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