Alan Manuel Gloria: > xref. Arne Babenhauserheide's concept, I'm proposing that we steal his > extended PERIOD notation and add it into sweet-expressions.
Thanks for writing this up, I've been noodling this as well. It's certainly worth considering. As I just posted in a previous email, one of my main concerns is that this might be confusing... but perhaps that concern is overblown. > However, the extended PERIOD notation is: > > foo > . x y > > ==> > > (foo > x y) Basically, "." acts sort-of like Fortran's line continuation, but it acts as a continuation of the PARENT (which may be long, long before the previous line). > This is useful in some cases: > > <* define-library \\ (srfi 41 primitive) > > export > . stream-cons stream-null > . stream-pair? stream-null? stream? > . stream-car stream-cdr > . stream-lambda Excellent example. A key question to me is, how common is the use case? > However, for the above case the current sweet-expressions can also express > this: > > <* define-library \\ (srfi 41 primitive) > > export . ( > stream-cons stream-null > stream-pair? stream-null? stream? > stream-car stream-cdr > stream-lambda > ) You're sneaky :-). Another approach is just: <* define-library \\ (srfi 41 primitive) export stream-cons \\ stream-null stream-pair? \\ stream-null? \\ stream? stream-car \\ stream-cdr stream-lambda ) *> > The question, really, is: > > Sometimes people write multiple short arguments to a form all on a > single line, in order to reduce vertical space. However, such a line > can be expressed using the existing . ( ... ) form (see "export" > example above). Arguably, the existing ". ( ... )" form is esoteric, > and "( )" disables ! indentation inside it. Should we support the new > extended PERIOD notation? > > AmkG: will support, will not push One wacky thing is that unlike Fortran's continuation, this would allow: aa bb cc ! dd ee ! ff gg ! hh ii ! . jj kk ! ll mm ==> (aa bb cc (dd ee) (ff gg) (hh ii) jj kk (ll mm)) It's not clear if that is GOOD or BAD, but it is DIFFERENT. --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
