Not to discourage you guys, but just a factoid to keep in mind... 'statistically', 31.891% of Lisp programmers have experimented with a non-parentheses syntax for Lisp (usually to try to make the language more appealing to other people), and 0.001% of those experiments have been used in any lasting way.

Also, some related work to look at in Racket: "Honu" and "P4P".

One way that Honu is useful is we can point to it and say, "If you don't like parentheses syntax, you can use Honu instead and still get all the goodness of Racket!" But in practice, I think pretty much everyone quickly starts using paren syntax, just like they quickly stop trying to put each closing paren on its own line. There is no invisible dominatrix making them do this, but they decide that the conventional way is not so onerous after all, or perhaps even that the conventional way makes good enough sense. Eventually, they might come to even love the parentheses.

If you want to push for a non-paren syntax that people actually use, then by all means do so, but I think you'll have to push very hard.

--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
_________________________________________________
 For list-related administrative tasks:
 http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users

Reply via email to