Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: Tla spork

[David Allouche]

On Fri, 2004-08-27 at 23:41 -0400, Charles Duffy wrote:
> My impression is that the folks who are getting involved in this discussion 
> are
> either those who (1) really, really love prefix notation, (2) really, really
> hate prefix notation, or (3) got pulled into the thread for reasons not
> necessarily related to notation. It's a self-selecting sample, and implicitly
> ignores the people whose response is "prefix? yeah, I can do that".

I would add a third category, neither distinct from nor included within
these first two: (4) people who regardless of the actual merits of lisp-
style notation and what they think personally, believe that the use such
notation will generate knee-jerk reactions.

People have been saying "yuck! it's all a bunch of shell scripts", we
can expect people to say "yuck! it's lisp". Equally irrational, equally
significant, and equally not to be ignored.

Furth/xl is certainly a useful internal processing model, and there have
already been ample discussion on how limited this processing should stay
for the sake of support by other tools (see Aaron Bentley on xl1).

It is certainly worth adding a little bit of complexity to the reader to
avoid unneeded brackets and other syntactic artefacts and keep the
simple use cases close to the common expectations.

I'm sure Tom understands that.

-- 
                                                            -- ddaa