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Re: sweet-expressions are not homoiconic

This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 110 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 110 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.



John Cowan (regarding Icon):
> If you're worried about it, make sure all continued lines end in _,
> that's all.

This brings up a different point - sweet-expressions do *not*
have a line-continuation capability, as it is currently defined.

One *could* be easily added. One approach would be to interpret "\\" at the
of a line as a line continuation; I even have a draft BNF construction that does
that.  We also dabbled with "." at the beginning
of a line as meaning "this continues the previous line".

But we've tried to *minimize* the number of mechanisms in the notation,
and there didn't seem to be a strong use case.
If the sub-components have structure you can just use
indentation as intended, and if it's just a long list of items, (...) works just fine.
IIRC, John Cowan was concerned that "\\" at the end of a line would be
confusing, too. 

For the moment, I'll just document this as a design decision.  If someone wants
to argue for a continuation symbol, please post.

--- David A. Wheeler