> I believe the idea was not to convert people who like s-exprs but rather
> to attract all those other programmers (including beginners) who don't
> like them. (It might also help convince older CS dept people to allow
> changing the intro CS course to H2DP using a non-parenthesis syntax.)
Precisely! Couldn't have put it better -- thanks.
> I don't understand why not write a lexer, since replacing "do: ()" with
> "{}" is the most natural and readable thing to do.
I really don't want to touch the lexer level.
Until this morning, I didn't know how to check for { ... }, which is
why I had the do: keyword. It appears that I can get rid of it. I
have to decide now whether I want to. I'll think about that.
> It also would allow
> "when:" to expect one argument by default since "when: {}" is easy to
> write.
That would be fine. I'll think about that, too.
> Infix notation can be achieved unambiguously if you use LL(1) with
> backtracking
...which I didn't want to do.
Pedagogically, it has been immensely valuable to explain to kids that
+ and - aren't some special thing, but are just mere operators -- and
so are string-append and image-overlay and so on.
Plus, there isn't much arithmetic in many Scheme programs, which means
the quantity of actual infix is small.
> Did the proposal address how quoting/unquoting could be done on P4P
> syntax (for macros, etc.), or how to make a list? I suppose "list(a, b,
> c)" would work, but do we not have "'(a, b, c)" or something too?
I had some trouble getting quote to work. It seems like it should not
be a problem. But it's on my list. I haven't thought about
unquoting, though it should be possible in principle. (It's always
been on the todo list at the top of the implementation file.)
Shriram
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