Readable Lisp S-expressions Project (2013)

Re:Readable Lisp S-expressions Project (2013) by henrikeh on Sunday July 07, 2019 @05:16PM (#20377911)

Never took off? In addition to the other replies, look at Mathematica/Wolfram Language where they are _the_ syntax:

    f[1, 2, 3]

And we can index it

    Part[f[1, 2, 3], 1] == 1

Now what would the 0th element be?

    Part[f[1, 2, 3], 0] == f

It is “head” or what corresponds to the first element in cons lists.

Also, as an appendix, there is no reason why you can’t have a “high-level” syntax and an abstract syntax which can both coexist. Mathematica has a syntax which can get quite cryptic (almost APL like at times), but it is possible to ask “freeze” expressions and print out the full m-expression form and thus inspect the structure of a function or similar.

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Re:Readable Lisp S-expressions Project (2013) by logicprog on Sunday July 07, 2019 @05:47PM (#20378123)

Yeah it's possible, but it leads to somewhat awkward languages where you have sometimes multiple levels of desugaring going on and it's annoying. The last time I looked into Julia (IIRC >6 years ago) it had something similar going on and it really scared me off. The problem with having a "technically homoiconic" language is that you're going to end up with not only lots of desugaring, but multiple syntaxes for the same things.

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