[implementations-list] Reading commit 1b34d16a226

Sun May 9 23:20:57 CEST 2010

> Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 22:35:39 +0200
> From: stepnem at gmail.com
>
> 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>).
Like a newspaper story, the former gets to the point before it starts
babbling. :)

Vegard 		 	   		  
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