Email list hosting service & mailing list manager

Comment on SRFI-110 and Comparison to Genyris xyzzy Bill Birch (22 May 2013 15:03 UTC)
Re: Comment on SRFI-110 and Comparison to Genyris xyzzy David A. Wheeler (23 May 2013 13:39 UTC)
sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (23 May 2013 16:08 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (23 May 2013 16:19 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (23 May 2013 16:32 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (24 May 2013 03:55 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (24 May 2013 03:12 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (24 May 2013 15:34 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (24 May 2013 20:02 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (24 May 2013 20:09 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (24 May 2013 21:35 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (24 May 2013 22:40 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (24 May 2013 23:13 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (25 May 2013 03:43 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (25 May 2013 03:20 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (25 May 2013 04:17 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (25 May 2013 04:27 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (25 May 2013 04:55 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (25 May 2013 18:14 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (26 May 2013 23:26 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 00:29 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John David Stone (27 May 2013 15:51 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Alan Manuel Gloria (28 May 2013 04:28 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (28 May 2013 18:34 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin (26 May 2013 20:40 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (26 May 2013 22:43 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 00:00 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Alexey Radul (27 May 2013 03:32 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 04:44 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Alexey Radul (27 May 2013 05:50 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Alan Manuel Gloria (27 May 2013 06:34 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 15:14 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 13:55 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Alexey Radul (27 May 2013 16:27 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (27 May 2013 15:55 UTC)
RE: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic Jos Koot (27 May 2013 04:57 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler (27 May 2013 13:37 UTC)
Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic John Cowan (27 May 2013 15:50 UTC)

Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic David A. Wheeler 27 May 2013 00:29 UTC

John David Stone:
>         I wouldn't have mentioned it at all if Wheeler hadn't used Icon as
> an example in support of his argument.

A mistake on my part.  My thanks to you and John Cowan for pointing out that
Icon does *not* use syntactically-meaningful indentation.
I've removed Icon from the list, instead added others like F# and ABC.
ABC isn't so common, but it's useful to show that the idea's been around a while.
F# and CoffeeScript are useful to show that there are
people *today* who choose them.

John Cowan:
>  > If you're worried about it, make sure all continued lines end in _,
>  > that's all.

>         Sigh.  Yes, of course -- a marker character... These are
> evidences of _failure to achieve homoiconicity_.  They are design kludges,
> used to paper over the incompatibility between whitespace used for layout
> and whitespace used to signal syntactic structure.

Markers are merely metasymbols, and *all* languages have metasymbols.
Heck, in traditional s-expressions, "(" and ")" are metasymbols because they
represent list constructors and not themselves.  Since s-expressions *are* homoiconic,
it's clear that a notation can have metasymbols (like markers) and still be homoiconic.

It's true that we've created markers to address issues in trying to use
whitespace for syntactic structure.  But these are not kludges; they are metasymbols
that turn a basic concept (syntactically-relevant indentation) into a practical notation.
Since all languages have metasymbols, this should be unsurprising.

The real trick is creating a relatively minimal set of metasymbols that are
powerful and work together.  You can always argue that there might be a better set...
but then you'll need to propose it :-).

--- David A. Wheeler