It's a mistake to ignore the customer [LWN.net]

It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 17:26 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
In reply to: It's a mistake to ignore the customer by dakas
Parent article: GNU Guile 2.0.7 released

> Scheme is the ultimately dumbed-down language for the computer,
No, it's not. As you were told multiple times by now, Scheme already has syntactic sugar for multiple constructs. 'x is (quote x), and (quote x) is (quote . (x . ())).

> Using infix in Scheme is like Yodish Pidgin English. Sort of defeats the original purpose of human and computer sharing a language for talking about code rather than humans expressing themselves to one another.
No, it doesn't. What makes Lisp Lisp is the ability to easily represent a program in the language's primary data structure and manipulate it. Infix syntax doesn't change that, it just makes things more readable. Again, you were told this multiple times, so I don't even know why I repeat it again. It's really a waste of time to argue with a stick-in-the-mud like you.

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It's a mistake to ignore the customer

Posted Dec 13, 2012 18:38 UTC (Thu) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

Not quite. The problem, in a sense, is that the structure chosen for representing program makes sense for optimizing interpreter a bit, at the cost of being very unnatural. Subtrees are not subexpressions. Sure, that way you avoid digging in to find the node where you'll be doing reduction, but that doesn't come for free. As the matter of fact (and you damn well know that, seeing that you seem to be familiar with e.g. Haskell), the things can be done the other way round - with APPLY being the fundamental primitive and CONS expressed via it. The same "easily represent program in the language's primary data structure" thing holds for a lot more than just LISP, e.g. when the primary data structure *is* partially evaluated expression. That's not what makes LISP LISP; neither is the syntax, of course.