[racket] Sweet expressions; or making it easier to introduce Racket to me and my coworkers :-)

On 07/20/2011 10:21 PM, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Not to discourage you guys, but just a factoid to keep in mind... 'statistically', 31.891% of Lisp programmers have experimented with a non-parentheses syntax for Lisp
> (usually to try to make the language more appealing to other people), and 0.001% of those experiments have been used in any lasting way.

As described in Steele and Gabriel, "The Evolution of Lisp":

"On the other hand, precisely because Lisp makes it easy to play with program representations, it is always easy for the novice to experiment with alternative notations. 
Therefore we expect future generations of Lisp programmers to continue to reinvent Algol-style syntax for Lisp, over and over and over again, and we are equally confident 
that they will continue, after an initial period of infatuation, to reject it. (Perhaps this process should be regarded as a rite of passage for Lisp hackers.)"

See http://www.cs.umbc.edu/courses/331/resources/papers/Evolution-of-Lisp.pdf ,
section 3.5.1 "Algol-Style Syntax",
which gives an impressive list of examples of alternative syntaxes for Lisp.

Although I must say that the {1 + 2} functionality by itself seems useful;
it is also pleasingly general.
OTOH, we already have (1 . + . 2) .

Stephan