* Charles Hixson | Lots of Irritating Single Parenthesis. I believe that there used to be a | dialect of Lisp where one could signal "close all parenthesis back to the | root" by using a ] character, but that seems to have disappeared. I | guess that it may have been a bit error prone.
* Pierre R. Mai | It turned out that this functionality belongs in the editor, and not the | language. That's why ] will close all outstanding parentheses in many | Lisp modes. This way you get the benefits, without the trouble. ...
for what it's worth, I have found it significantly easier to write code in Emacs with M-( and M-) rather than ( and ). I guess I picked up that habit when I wrote an SGML-mode that automatized the matching between start- and end-tags and inserted every character of the element name in _both_ the start- and the end-tag. I generalized this to let, e.g., M-* produce ** with the cursor between them, and applied it to "", `', {}, [], <>, «», ¡!, ¿?, and for that old Common Lisp reader, ||, as well as comments with #||#. in my view, it's a serious mistake to use paired delimiters of any kind in a language without _actively_ supporting their paired entry when writing.
