On 26 December 2011 18:09, Louis Yu Lu <louisy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My proposition is enhance Clojure to accept both (f x) and f(x), the
> leading item can appear either after ‘(‘ as usual with classic Lisp
> notion:
> (println "Hello," "world!")
> or with conventional function call notation:
> println("Hello," "world!")
> The f(x) notation is just a syntax sugar, the only restriction is no
> space between the leading item and '('. If one or more spaces in
> between, the item will be treated as a separate symbol.
This seems a -really- bad idea. I doubt there's any chance whatsoever
of this being adopted in Clojure.
Here's some reasons why not:
1. Using a single space to differentiate two completely different data
structures seems prone to error. e.g. (f (g x)) != (f(g x)).
2. The syntax is inconsistent with other data structures, unless you
make f[x] = [f x] and f{x} = {f x}
3. It obscures the fact we're dealing with lists. When I see f(x), it
doesn't intuitively look like a list of two elements, whilst (f x)
does.
4. Two syntaxes for defining lists would make maintaining Clojure
programs -really- annoying.
5. It's incompatible with Lisp-aware editors like Emacs/Paredit.
I'm sure there are more reasons, but those should be enough
considering the only advantage is to make Clojure slightly more
approachable. And really, having a different syntax is good, because
it helps enforce the idea that (f x) is a data structure, not just a
function call.
- James
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