From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: [9fans] samuel (fwd) From: "Russ Cox" MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 09:41:27 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5eb15360-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > if plan9/inferno switched to beeing implemented in something-else, that > did not use ',",`,[,{,(,<, i strongly belive (IMHO, ok?) that a > language mode would be developed. what terrible languages are you envisioning that would be so difficult for humans to read as to _require_ the use of external help? the language #!/bin/rc cat $* | tr '^@' '()' | lisp would benefit from ^-@ matching, but aside from contrived examples i can't understand what more you want your text editor to do. russ The various ML dialects share the same flaw in their syntax. They lack a simple property I call editor friendliness. An editor friendly language has the property that a simple calculation is all that is needed to locate the beginning of an expression when one is at the end of an expression. As you can guess, Lisp is a very editor friendly language. Because of this fact, an experienced Emacs user realizes nearly all of the benefits of structure based editing without suffering from its restrictions. - John D. Ramsdell The various Lisp dialects share the same flaw in their syntax. They lack a simple property I call human friendliness. A human friendly language has the property that syntactic constructs are different enough from one another that a simple visual inspection is all that is needed to locate the beginning of an expression when one is at the end of an expression. As you can guess, Lisp is a very human unfriendly language. Because of this fact, an experienced Lisp user realizes that it is virtually impossible to write Lisp programs of any size without substantial mechanical assistance. - Andrew Koenig