Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when Anthony Cartmell would say:
>"Erik Naggum" <e...@naggum.no> wrote in message
>news:3163031395198264@naggum.no...
>> such as their own lines. in Common Lisp, the list structure is much
>less
>> important than the indentation, and the perspicuity of normal
>indentation
>> rules is sufficiently high that the parens are mainly used there for the
>> machine to use, not humans. therefore, humans would tend to get parens
>> in CL out of the (visual) way, while the braces in C must be very
>visible.
>Sorry for the "newbie" question, but I thought that the indentation was
>based on the list structure, and not the other way round. If the parens
>were based on the indentation then we wouldn't even need to use them. My
>whole reason for using dangling parens in my code is to show which
>open-paren each close-paren closes by its indentation. I don't understand
>why this is such a bad layout style.
It's that if you're using a text editor that provides *any* support
for paren matching (just about anything better than MSFT WordPad), or
one that provides indentation support (e.g. - like Emacs), then
there's no *value* to having the parens dangle.
And if it's not really buying you anything, then the cost of having
less on the screen is a real cost, and *THAT* is the Bad Thing.
>> different languages have different optimization parameters for almost
>> every facet of their expression. trying to optimize CL code layout with
>> the parameters from C is completely braindamaged and merits
>> nothing but a snort, and people who are _that_ underdeveloped in
>> their understanding of the differences between languages should
>> just be sedated and put away.
>I lay my Lisp code out the way I do for the reason given above, and not
>because of any other language's layout style.
>> which.) I think the need to understand how things came to be applies to
>> everything, but retracing the steps of decisions made by large groups of
>> people is usually quite depressing, so there is wisdom in accepting the
>> authorities at times. yet, accepting or rejecting authorities _because_
>> they are authorities is really retarded and people who are prone to this
>> should also be sedated and put away.
>Couldn't agree more. What I'm trying to do, prompted by criticism of my
>code layout in a public place, is to find out *why* the Lisp community
>rejects one-paren-per-line apparently so strongly. If there's a good reason
>I *may* change the coding layout I've used successfully, with others, for
>the last eight years.
>Does anyone know?
Because screen space is *always* at a premium, regardless of how big
the screen is.
Wasting a line is a waste of a line, and wasting a whole line for one
lousy parenthesis is just plain silly. If you have a deeply nested
object, it's going to be followed by potentially a whole screen of
lines that have nothing more than a single parenthesis.
--
"Parentheses? What parentheses? I haven't noticed any parentheses
since my first month of Lisp programming. I like to ask people who
complain about parentheses in Lisp if they are bothered by all the
spaces between words in a newspaper..."
-- Kenny Tilton <t...@liii.com>
cbbro...@hex.net- <http://www.hex.net/~cbbrowne/lisp.html>
