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.
Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin <cben@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Other notable examples: > - YAML which has largely won over JSON as a human-writable notation. > - Lists & quotations in Markdown, reStructuredText etc. > - The triumvirate of > - HAML > - Sass > - Coffeescript Great points. I'll add them to the SRFI, as well as some other links. Certainly it shows that this approach has been used in many places. F#, HAML, Sass, and Coffeescript are certainly not old, so it's not an idea that has disappeared. > As for "expressing thought", a lot of pseud-code styles use indentation for > grouping. > StructuredText was a notable cautionary tale - it used indentation for > everything including chapter structure, which caused whole documents to be > intented (similar to the define-library situation); reStructuredText was > borne out of fixing that. I think that is important to note. It's all fine and well to say "don't add markers to indentation-based languages"... until you try to USE it. Then you find that indentation sensitivity is MOSTLY fine... and the trick is to fix the mostly. ... > - Python tightly anchored the transition from indentation to delimiters to > the semantical statement/expression boundary. As a result lambdas are > crippled forever â nobody came up with a satisfactory syntax for > statements-inside-lambdas. > If Python were defined on top of Sweet expressions one would be free to > keep the lambda and the surrounding function call(s) in indentation land. Agreed. Since we've focused on having a *general* notation, we don't have that problem at all. > Neoteric & Sweet expressions advance the state of the art by separating > infix and indentation sensitivity from the rest of the language design. > This allows other sugar to be defined over an already parsed tree > (ideally via macros inside the language), which facilitates language > innovation â same way s-expressions did. > Don't judge it merely on bringing indentation to the homoiconic Lisp world > â it's also bringing the gift of homoiconity to the indentation (and > infix)-loving crowd! > > I don't know if the experiment will succeed, but I'm happy that David is > trying. Thanks! --- David A. Wheeler