On Jul 21, 2011, at 6:44 AM, Stephen Bloch wrote: > Right. Nested conditionals and loops in Racket are no more syntactically > painful than nested conditionals and loops in Java/C/C++, if you put braces > around the bodies. > ( if ( > x y ) (+ x 3 ) ( * 4 y ) ) > if ( x > y ) { x = 3 ; } else { y = 4 ; }
You don't have to go non-idiomatic in Racket to approximate the non-nesting, step-by-step style of C, Java, and such languages. Now that define is legal in many places, just give names to intermediate results. More generally, here is a conjecture about the psychology of programming: people take to programming in C more easily than to algebra because they can 'store' intermediate results in 'registers' and take a break to contemplate what to do next. Warning: this is an untested conjecture by a guy who has 0 background in psychology or how to conduct an experiment. All of this is based on observations. -- Matthias _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/users