It was a very interesting book about a computer architecture that thanks to the FP abstractions would, in theory, allow the users to get automatically scaling for free.

Something like Clojure parallel abstractions, but that was a Lisp Machine like environment, not a plain language runtime.

However I cannot recall anything else about the book, other that the book cover might have been a green one.

If i remember correctly it's Hillis' PhD thesis: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hillis%20-%20The%20Connection%20M...

Thanks for pointing it out.

https://www.amazon.com/Paralation-Model-Architecture-Indepen...

I think that's just a comment. It follows '%' as in TeX.

But yes, nowadays programmers tend to love concise syntax (myself included), not to mention elegant syntax, which is ever harder to define.

For example we make a big deal about being able to type 'x => x * 2' instead of 'function (x) { return x * 2; }' in Javascript, or '[]' instead of 'array()' in PHP. One of the draws of ML-derived functional languages (such as Haskell) and maybe APL-derived ones is the fact that they are very much 'shorthand' programming languages.

At the same time, one should not stop at the syntax, but try to understand the ideas behind a programming language. Syntax can always be improved with a bit of aesthetic sense, but good ideas are hard to come by.

  (* 2)

  \x -> x * 2

  2*

I do not immediately see this causing problems for correct programs, but it would probably lead to horribly confusing problems in incorrect code, including converting some type errors into runtime errors.

A simpler approach is to say that you can not have a space after the unary "-", so (-2) parses to a numeric literal, and (- 2) parses to a function.

I wouldn't call it undeservedly obscure.