Re: Reader option to permit brackets as parentheses

[thi <ttn@mingle.glug.org>]

Greg Badros writes:

 > Clearly you aren't convinced, and I believe you're probably in the
 > majority among this list's readers, but I've lately been teaching
 > scheme in an undergraduate programming languages course here at the
 > UW and the students definitely seem to like the ability to use [],
 > and find my examples more clear when I reliably and consistently use
 > [] in certain special forms (e.g., let bindings).
 > 
 > Bottom line is I thought the option would be nice.  I'd expect it to
 > be pretty easy to verify empirically that programmers (especially
 > novice ones) can better understand Scheme programs that use []
 > reliably and consistently.  (And I hypothesize little harm by random
 > use of paird [] instead of () ).

if the use of [] is syntactically regular (such as let bindings), you
could probably munge emacs to use overlays to represent those specific
parens.  the user enters (proper) parens but sees brackets, etc.  this
is then encapsulated in the window (not even in the buffer) and in the
mind of the user, where such squareness might have value.  :->

digressing into an aesthetic trance here....  i think square brackets
look ok alone, but they seem to nest oddly.  ie, [this is ok], but
[[this] [looks weird]], whereas ((this) (is also ok)).  the squares seem
to indicate that nesting is an impossibility in my mind.  anyone who has
had to stack lawn chairs probably understands what i'm getting at.

ramblingly yours,
thi