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Dear Paul, when I say its syntax is its best friend, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

Now, say I fork lisp and change one little thing:

(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))

to this:

[defun foo [n] [lambda [i] [incf n i]]]

or even this:

{defun foo {n} {lambda {i} {incf n i}}}

or how about this?

<defun foo <n> <lambda <i> <incf n i>>>

Hmm, trees are powerful, no matter how they are expressed huh?

What if we can represent the same trees using colons and commas as delimiters?

:defun foo:n, :lambda:i, :incf n i.

Maybe spice it up a bit using periods as recursive closing delimiter.

See? still powerful trees!

Between common lisp and colon lisp, I still use the latter.

Love is blindness.



Sure, trees are powerful no matter how you delimit them. Most Lisp hackers would be fine with using {}, [], or <> if they had to. What Lisp hackers like is programming in lists, not parens per se.

I don't see what you're trying to claim. Initially you seemed to be saying that you preferred conventional sytax to sexprs. I pointed out that this meant you had to give up macros. You reply that you could use other characters to delimit sexprs. Sure, but so what?


Taking a closer look at my macbook keyboard, of all the lisp forks, I'd go with squared brackets [lisp] for convenience.

Ergonomics win.


If that's the only thing stopping you, just tweak your editor's keymappings.




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