Re: Reader option to permit brackets as parentheses

[Craig Brozefsky <craig@red-bean.com>]

cwitty@newtonlabs.com (Carl R. Witty) writes:
> In Haskell (another language where whitespace is lexically
> significant), any expression can also be written in a form where
> whitespace is not lexically significant.  There is a simple lexical
> preprocessing phase that looks at the indentation of successive lines
> and adds open and close braces and semicolons; if you use explicit
> open and close braces, then the "layout rule" is not active.

That's a nice solution, and I agree that it's the way a scheme
implementation wanting to support significant whitespace should work.
But it seems like alot of work to get rid of explicit parenthesis,
which become visually insignificant with a littl bit of experience,
but still let you be explicit in your grouping.

> I must admit that I'm having a hard time imagining what a whitespace
> structured Scheme would look like; I doubt if I'd use it (even though
> I really like the Haskell layout rule).

Since I target R5RS rather than particular scheme implementations in
my current projects, I would not be able to use it.  Also, It would
mean changing my editing modes to support this new syntax, which may
or may not be difficult.

-- 
Craig Brozefsky                         <craig@red-bean.com>
Free Scheme/Lisp Software     http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
I say woe unto those who are wise in their own eyes, and yet
imprudent in 'dem outside                            -Sizzla