[racket] syntax, differently

From: Greg Hendershott (greghendershott at gmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 1 22:13:52 EDT 2010

Wow, 40+ messages about indents. Did y'all just finish a project milestone? ;)

BTW I agree with Eli. It's weird that "if" indents differently than
"when", "unless", "case", "cond", "match".

I can't remember the name, what was that DrRacket add-on for efficient
sexpr editing?

On Sun, Aug 1, 2010 at 9:43 PM, Richard Cleis <rcleis at mac.com> wrote:
> Perhaps this is related to some of what you are saying: For years I put
> double spaces after every initial element that had more purpose than a basic
> function (define, cond, let, etc.) I wish I had time to make a formatter do
> that, because I still like it.
>
> RAC
> On Aug 1, 2010, at 7:23 PM, Ray Racine <ray.racine at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Ah yes, re-playing back those early scheme days in my head.  As all do and
> did,  I wrested with parens, and recursion.  Recursion did finally click and
> even now 1/2 the time I find myself "looping" with a recursive function in
> Scala.  I don't give it second thought, it does confuse the hell out of
> others however who read the code.  Even funnier, I now think how come they
> can't seem to "get it".  But it did kick my ass in the day.
> But parens ....  I did finally make a separate peace with parens, but in a
> very unique manner.  It turned out it wasn't the parens after all it was the
> pseudo special forms/keywords + parens that created the dissonance.
> As a joke, literally two beers bored as hell on Friday night
> what-the-hell-as-a-joke exercise, I used emacs to redefine each of the
> common special-form / keywords to single greek letters. lambda ->
> lambda-char, define -> lower-delta, if -> lower-iota, begin -> lower-rho,
> let -> lower-beta, set! -> lower-sigma, 'and', 'or', 'not' -> the single
> char logic symbols, #t #f -> top and bottom symbols, etc.
> I read rho means 'r'un.  I read beta as 'b'ind.  I read sigma as 's'et! etc.
>  And a few years later, I'm still coding in joke mode.
> Sigma (set!) is a bright red char.  All others in chars in a light blue.  I
> use a black background, and parens are in a light grey, you almost can't see
> them.  I constantly let emacs indent and 'tab' lines into place.  In other
> words, indentation guides first, parens second and as the last resort when I
> get 'lost'.
> All other text is bright white on black.  Nesting is more symmetrical and
> cleaner.  I'm sure everyone out there will just hate it.
> So where am I going with this.   Just tossing out the thought that its not
> the parens per se, but parens combined with the core forms which are the
> issue.  Particularly: define, let, begin, if.
> Very curious if its just an odd twist to my mental makeup, I'm slightly
> dyslexic as well, or some others might end up seeing it the same way.
> Skeptical??  I believe DrRacket added delta (for 'define') and lambda greek
> char capability long ago.  May have even been driven from an earlier posting
> by me on this very topic to the list a number of years back.  Complete the
> experiment by adding single greek chars aliases for 'let', 'begin',  et al.
> You're probably wondering by now, so without further ado, Ladies and
> Gentleman I give you "Funky Racket
> Syntax" http://imagebin.ca/view/s6SHn7c.html
> I tried to actually pick "bad" examples.  I'm sure you'll all agree I
> succeeded.
>
>
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