Arun Isaac <arunis...@systemreboot.net> writes:
> Hi Blake, > >> Well, these conventions can be found throughout the gamut of scheme >> literature going back to the 80s, and some of the largest scheme >> projects, such as Chez, Racket, etc. employ them. So if you're >> getting into Scheme, you'll necessarily encounter them, and if you >> haven't been made aware that brackets are syntactic sugar for parens >> in Scheme, or if that doesn't become apparent with some quick repl >> experimentation, you've probably jumped into pattern matching a bit >> too quickly. >> >> But overall, it seems the objections against the Indiana style here >> are primarily concerned with individual, current user/contributor >> preferences, rather than out of a concern for the target audience, >> which are newcomers. > > I don't think I agree. When I was a newcomer to guile and was reading > the sxml-match documentation in the manual for the first time, I found > it very confusing that there were square brackets. At that point, I > understood match but was confounded into thinking that sxml-match was > completely different due to the square brackets. Finally, when I > understood, I contributed a patch making everything round > parentheses. https://issues.guix.gnu.org/30920 > > I'd say a typical newcomer is not familiar with the gamut of scheme > literature going back to the 80s. I certainly wasn't, and still am not > to be honest. Point taken, but I'd remark that I didn't mean that newcomers should be familiar with existing literature, but rather that its common convention with roots going way back, rather than an ad-hoc notation. > > Cheers! > Arun
