On 4/25/06, Pupeno <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Monday, 24 de April de 2006 22:12, Shawn Rutledge wrote: > > A side project is how to get rid of the parentheses so that ordinary > > people can tolerate writing Scheme. > Getting rid of parenthesis is dangerous, people may forget that while writting > Scheme programs you are doing it as Scheme data and that programs are no more > than a tree (build up with cons... lists if you like).
OK, so the concept that data and code are the same is important, but the parentheses are just there because pre-order syntax with variable numbers of arguments requires some kind of delimiter. (And HP calculator users take the opposite stance that RPN is so wonderful precisely because you don't need delimiters.) I think teaching the concept requires some thought about the structure in memory; it's way more important than the ASCII syntax. The books use diagrams to show this, yet there is no editor to let you interactively modify memory by manipulating diagrams. (And then there is the related issue that keyboarding is faster than mousing. So you just have to make the diagram manipulation similarly efficient by keyboard. MathCAD achieved this, for math expressions. I used to use it on DOS, without a mouse.) _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users