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Nils Goesche  
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 More options Mar 1 2002, 9:15 am
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
From: Nils Goesche <car...@cartan.de>
Date: 1 Mar 2002 14:15:37 GMT
Local: Fri, Mar 1 2002 9:15 am
Subject: Re: newbie in deep over his head
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In article <sfw3czkl9dt....@shell01.TheWorld.com>, Kent M Pitman wrote:
> Nils Goesche <car...@cartan.de> writes:

>> I remember that I disliked #'(lambda ...) from the very first time I
>> saw it.  To me, (lambda ...) looks like something that evaluates
>> to a /function/, not to a symbol whose value slot would be taken
>> if I left out the #'.

> It's probably a matter of historical effect, but I find #'foo and
> #'(lambda ...) to be more aesthetic, not less.

> First, it makes it easier to find the head of the function.

> Second, it is more consistent to me because it means functions as data
> are all case-marked by #'.  I was taught that #' was followed by a function
> name, and that (lambda ...) was the name of a function.

I am not sure if that was clear: I have nothing against #'car,
only against #'(lambda ...), because if #'blark is a function
that returns another function I do (funcall (blark ...) ...); then,
(funcall (lambda ...) ...) looks more visually consistent, doesn't it?
It doesn't, of course, if you think of (lambda ...) as the ``name''
of a function, as you say, but that sounds really foreign to me :-)
Indeed a cultural matter, it seems.

> I find it quite a lot more offensive to see every keyword in purple
> (or whatever) and every string in brown and so on just because I may
> not be caring about comments or keywords.  I definitely am annoyed
> to see editors highlight the definition name in a function even when
> I'm not debugging anything that requires use of the name.

> I have grudgingly tried to train myself to live with colors because
> I think most people like them, and because there are occasionally
> times that the color tells me something important.  But I almost
> wish I could have an editor that hid color and that had a command
> that would instantaneously enable color when I was searching for
> something in particular...

> (I have similar problems with Unix ANSI-colored directory list,
> which is always highlighting too many things, making it hard to find
> the one kind of thing I want highlit.)

Interesting.  I love syntax coloring just as much as I violently
hate ``ls --color''...

How about ``ls -F''?  Does that look fine to you?

> Bottom line?  Programming language notations are statically required
> all the time.  Focus issues are dynamically needed or not needed,
> so are not always well addressed by static notation.  It's often
> a judgment call what to emphasize and what not to in the static
> notation, and people often think they're being a lot more principled
> than they are.  Mostly I don't see a lot of science applied here
> at all.

Sure, it is pretty clear that this is all about aesthetics.  Trying
to have a rigorous discussion about this seems as futile to me as,
say, wondering about what kind of being the ``it'' in ``it is
rainy'' is :-)

Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."

PGP key ID 0x42B32FC9


 
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