maybe not only familiarity [LWN.net]

maybe not only familiarity

Posted Dec 10, 2012 8:38 UTC (Mon) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988)
In reply to: maybe not only familiarity by tpo
Parent article: GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

> On the other hand it would hint to why prefix notation is hard to handle for humans - it supposedly simply doesn't match the "natural" way a brain works.

At best it's hard to handle for speakers of SVO languages. It's like arguing that Arabic (a VSO language, equivalent to prefix notation) or Japanese (a SOV language, equivalent to suffix notation) are "hard to handle" and "don't match the natural way a brain works". Try telling that to the Arabs and Japanese ;)

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maybe not only familiarity

Posted Dec 10, 2012 9:24 UTC (Mon) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

I'm not familiar with VSO languages: do they also, as Scheme does, put *all* verbs at the start of the sentence in case of nested statements? As in:

(do (another_do (yet_another_do (and_more_do (and_still_more_do arg arg

aka

verb1 verb2 verb3 verb4 verb5 subject1 object 1 subject2 object2 object2a

I honestly do not know, but I'd guess even a VSO language will not work that way as opposed to Lisp'ish languages?

maybe not only familiarity

Posted Dec 10, 2012 17:06 UTC (Mon) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

Deeply nested expressions are a problem in any language, moreso in natural languages which are not traditionally formatted to highlight the subexpressions. If you find yourself writing such expressions in Scheme, you may want to look into refactoring the code, or at least taking advantage of the "nest" macro to flatten the expression. An example:

(do arg1
    (another_do
      (yet_another_do
        (and_more_do arg2
                     (and_still_more_do arg3 arg4)))))

is equivalent to:

(nest [(do arg1)
       (another-do)
       (yet-another-do)
       (and-more-do arg2)
       (and-still-more-do arg3)]
  arg4)