On Sun, May 09, 2010 at 09:20:57PM +0000, Vegard Øye wrote:
Actually, I tend to feel mildly irritated by things like (= 2 ) (which you seem to prefer) -- to me it makes much more sense to preserve the natural language logic of the expression, i.e. "Is equal to 2?", in its programming-language rendering.
I agree that natural syntax matters, since we think in natural syntax.
The problem is that many programming statements, especially those in Lisp, have way more levels than do natural sentences. That clumsy matching and type conversion you pointed out was more or less the Elisp equivalent of the following passage:
Isn't the proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, an excellent example of linguistic recursion?
Except that I actually phrased it in this way:
Isn't an excellent example of linguistic recursion the proverbial German phenomenon of the verb-at-the-end about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told?
In this case, (eq <good-example> (level (level (level ...)))) seems better to me than (eq (level (level ...)) <good-example>).
Not to me; and as the 3rd of your original lisp examples in a former e-mail shows, you can use indentation to make it a non-issue even from your-definition-of-readability point of view. It's how you _think_ about things what really matters here, not how you express something in a natural language. The two, albeit related, are distinct -- that's why I used the word "logic", not "syntax". The very example of the error you made shows how unhelpful going against one's thinking while writing in a language is. Štěpán