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Re:Damien Katz: What Sucks About Erlang by gruseom on Sunday March 09, 2008 @08:38PM (#132824)
If by "good s-expression syntax" you mean a representation suitable for embedding into a Lisp, then yes: it's obvious, there's no glaring flaw, you get macros for free, and it is done extensively. There's an s-expression representation (or several) for pretty much anything you'd want to integrate with a Lisp program. Examples of common ones are HTML, SQL, and Javascript.

Where you don't see this done much is with general-purpose programming languages. This is probably because people who find s-expressions useful are already using Lisp as their general-purpose language. So it's mostly done for interoperability with other, pre-existing systems, like web browsers or C libraries. (You can see an example of the latter on slides 15 and 16 of http://www.xach.com/lisp/lispvan-2008-02-28.pdf.)

Erlang is a fascinating intermediate case. The distinctive value of Erlang is arguably not in the language, but in its runtime and libraries (including Mnesia). For this reason, the "general-purpose" caveat doesn't apply, and it's easy to see why someone might want to build a Lisp program on top of the Erlang runtime via embedded s-expressions. I seem to recall that there was a game company already doing this. If anyone knows about that or other examples, please post them here.

Re:Damien Katz: What Sucks About Erlang by lg on Sunday March 09, 2008 @08:57PM (#132830)
robert virding (of "hello, robert" erlang movie fame) released "lisp-flavoured erlang" recently. Haven't played with it yet... http://groups.google.com/group/erlang-questions/browse_threa...
Re:Damien Katz: What Sucks About Erlang by eru on Monday March 10, 2008 @08:40AM (#133097)
Hello, Dave.