Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Unix Weenies (formerly: Removing READ)
Message-ID: <hbaker-2602952352540001@192.0.2.1>
Sender: hbaker@netcom4.netcom.com
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References: <bakulD4H8yp.EL8@netcom.com> <25Feb1995.021048.Alan@LCS.MIT.EDU> <bakulD4L23y.I25@netcom.com> <hbaker-2602950905210001@192.0.2.1> <bakulD4MsMD.4HI@netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 1995 07:51:16 GMT
Lines: 42

In article <bakulD4MsMD.4HI@netcom.com>, bakul@netcom.com (Bakul Shah) wrote:

> hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker) writes:
> 
> >In article <bakulD4L23y.I25@netcom.com>, bakul@netcom.com (Bakul Shah) wrote:
> 
> >> I doubt an S-expr can be designed to be as compact as a reg-expr
> >> to do the same job.
> 
> >The redundancy of an S-expression should no longer be an issue.  If it
> >bothers you, use compress/gzip/etc.
> 
> Compression doesn't help when I want to type in a regular
                                          ^^^^^^^
> expression.  May be you find 
>         [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9]*
> harder to read/use/type than
>         (sequence
>           (one-of (range #\a #\z) (range #\A #\Z))
>           (zero-or-more
>             (one-of (range #\a #\z) (range #\A #\Z) (range #\0 #\9))))
> but I don't.  I do admit that you'd need something like the
> latter form for specifying reg-expr of anything other than
> character strings.

I presume that the operative words are 'type in'.

My problem isn't in typing the stuff in, but in remembering what the
&^%(^%&^%&*^%'ing syntax is.  I spend 15 minutes screwing around in
my bookshelf or in my man pages looking up this junk, and 30 seconds
typing it in.

Unless you are typing this stuff in 6 hours per day, I find it hard
to believe that this is a reasonable tradeoff.

This is roughly the same reason why I prefer the Macintosh over the PC.
The PC begs for 'one-up-man-ship', whereby the PC lover types something
that looks like line noise (but _different_ line noise for every single
program, it appears), in order to get things done.

The Mac sometimes takes a few more keystrokes/mouseclicks, but there's
a good deal more uniformity among the various programs.
