Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan,comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!dircon!rheged!simon
From: simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
Subject: Re: Advice for Parenthophobes
Message-ID: <D64BoJ.1Az@rheged.dircon.co.uk>
Organization: none. Disorganization: total.
References: <3jn9s4$sps@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <3k3gec$o9t@cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu> <3kn8cd$qj@Yost.com> <3kpi0h$f4r@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov>
Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 21:29:06 GMT
Lines: 33
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.dylan:3893 comp.lang.lisp:17219

In article <3kpi0h$f4r@stc06.ctd.ornl.gov>,
Kennel <kennel@msr.epm.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.

With an in-core structure editor, such for example as the wonderful
DEdit, it is literally impossible to get your brackets either out of
sync or out of proper pretty-print alignment.

Next problem?



-- 
------- simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
   "This young man has not the faintest idea how socialists think and does
   not begin to understand the mentality of the party he has been elected
   to lead. He is quite simply a liberal" -- Ken Coates MEP (Lab) of Tony Blair
