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From: mcdonald@kestrel.edu (Jim McDonald)
Subject: Re: Advice for Parenthophobes
Message-ID: <1995Mar28.024636.19910@kestrel.edu>
Organization: Kestrel Institute, Palo Alto, CA
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References: <3jn9s4$sps@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <3k0gv3$jpt@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <3k1t00$4gd@stc06.CTD.ORNL.GOV> <3k3gec$o9t@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <3kn8cd$qj@Yost.com> <3kpi0h$f4r@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov>
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 1995 02:46:36 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:3895 comp.lang.lisp:17221

Kennel (mbk@jt3ws1.etd.ornl.gov) wrote:
: Dave Yost (yost@Yost.com) wrote:

: > This is one of the keys to the Parenthetical Mystery.  You
: > have to experience a lisp-smart editor yourself for perhaps
: > several hours to understand how an interactive lisp-editing
: > tool affects your perception of lisp syntax.  A major part
: > of Parenthophobia is worrying about all those piled-up
: > parentheses on the right at the end.  The modern text
: > editors for lisp make this a non-problem.  But you have to
: > experience it yourself to get it.

: Yes and no.  A Lisp-smart editor changes an insane parentheses
: counting problem into a somewhat less difficult but still non-trivial
: visual positional matching problem which, in my personal
: preference, is unfortunately more difficult than doing the same
: with automatically indented irregular keyword languages given
: similarly complex programs.

: > Dave Yost

: Matt

When I'm reading well-written lisp code, I hardly notice the parens,
any more than I see semi-colons when I read C code.  If I have to pay
attention to syntax at that level, it often means something
pathological is occurring, independently of the language.

I use a language called REFINE that uses an infix syntax on top of
Common Lisp augmented by many features.  Shifting between Lisp and
Refine code requires almost no pauses and reads about equally fast--
I'm seeing essentially the same thing (except in cases where the
Refine code uses additional features such as transforms), much as your
mind's eye sees a story unfold when you nominally are reading the
words in a novel.

Going from Refine to C code, however, requires a complete mental
shift, since it's the semantics, not the syntax, that affects my
reading speed.

