[racket] Opening

From: Hendrik Boom (hendrik at topoi.pooq.com)
Date: Sat Feb 12 13:33:39 EST 2011

On Sat, Feb 12, 2011 at 07:37:43AM -0800, Gregory Woodhouse wrote:
> I remember using a Lisp as an undergraduate (Franz Lisp?) that used the right angle bracket as a kind of super right parenthesis that could close multiple right parentheses. It was really ugly.

The problem with that is that you hope you had closed off all the open 
parantheses that needed to be closed off before you got to the mass 
closure.  If you didn't, you eliminated any possibility of having the 
syntax discover you made a mistake, and yo uleavee it to runtime to be 
mysterious.

I used a different notation in another Lisp, where a '/' meand an open 
parenthesis that owuls be closed off by the next real ')'.  The ')' 
closed off everything up to the real '(' it matched.

This reduced the number of parentheses that needed counting visually 
without making parenthesis errors silent.

-- hendrik


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