Paul Wilson proposed a syntax for shell programming:
> 1. Common special forms like IF use balanced keywords (maybe palindromic,
> as above, maybe not) which act as implicit parentheses as well as
> specifying which special form is meant.
I think you can get the benefits of this idea with a loop-macro style of
syntax, like so:
(define (gosh wow)
(let (x = (* wow wow))
(y = 42)
in (if foo
then (+ x y)
else (- x))))
This assumes what makes parenthephobes go `yuck' is the spareness of prefix
notation with positional arguments, not the parentheses themselves -- as the
success of Tcl suggests. People might want an `infix' macro, too, as in
(infix x * (f x) + y * (f y)).
(I prefer Scheme just the way it is, btw.)
>So you end up with things like [set $a $a+1].
set a [expr $a+1], not that that affects your point.
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Darius Bacon http://www.well.com/user/djello/
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