<html> <head> <meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type"> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> It doesn't have to be exactly PicoLisp.  I would be happy with a thin wrapper library that simply translates super-long-names into names.  Define being called "define" because it equals the English spelling isn't too compelling or else German programmers are in trouble.  define is definieren.  I imagine define-syntax-parameter is definieren-schalggendlahg-paravolddennneinen and they probably use 230 width margins as a default...else they don't use full words.  In Pico, define = de.  Many newish languages use def.  Haskell goes off of formatting and "=" (a single character is about as good as it gets...).  Arc's print = pr, etc.  It's not good when a functional language's main function-defining-construct takes the same total characters as 3 other languages combined (def+de+=). The following is halfway about Racket conventions/style, halfway about pattern matching is evil (esp. without type inference), and is mainly me rambling, so be advised... I have thought further about mixed data and verbosity, and I believe the fundamental issue is static typing, the lack of, and trying to simulate it with fancier types (at the expense of verbosity).  Mixed data without static types thus has the verbosity downside but without the hypothetical safety upside...the struct amounts to a built-in comment about what is supposed to be its data, but it's really just a list with lengthier access functions and lack of list-powered functions to operate on it.  Lack of static typing means (struct pos (x y)) sure looks like something that contains numbers but in untyped Racket it's really just (list any/c any/c), without the ability to treat it as a list.  So something like e.g. distance from 0 in the moves on a square grid sense is: (+ (pos-x p) (pos-y p)) instead of: (apply + p) which really should be: (app + p) Then, if you change the struct, your code is secretly wrong everywhere you pattern match.  One is "supposed" to abstract with functions.  In SICP it's a given that accessors are in terms of caadaaar and such, versus relying on the fact that it's actually at the position referred to by caadaaar, exactly what pattern matching does.  Many example problems for the purposes of demonstrating the value of abstraction have the reader redefine the datatype, requiring changes to only the accessors, say cadaar instead of cdadar.  Pattern matching undoes this advantage and the programmer is in a situation where every usage of the struct must be tracked down or suffer runtime errors.  This disadvantage is minimized with static typing and type inference.  Haskell can tell you that either 1. a String is not an Int within some ADT or that 2. there aren't enough positions matched against in the first place.  The syntax is also superior: (match-define (cons (pos x y) ps) ps0 versus, in Haskell: (Pos x y):ps' = ps Or in "short Racket": (mdef (cons (cons x y) ps) ps0 or even: (mde ((x.y).ps) ps0 and we're at half the length of normal Racket, or: caar, cdar, and cdr respectively to compose the "struct" access functions with the list ones with the addition of a single letter (caar vs. (compose pos-x car)), or, lastly, to be fully SICP compliant, using names that the struct maker in Racket would've come up with, except potentially much shorter than the auto-generated ones.  I'm aware these can be renamed, but there's still the disadvantage that structs aren't lists. As for going pure cons, I don't believe caar is a spaghetti code version of the pattern match above.  In the programmer's mind x has to be constantly thought of as the most recent position's x coord all the way through the section where it's in scope, or else he can't be using it correctly.  He must know what x really is, not where he got it from.  Pattern matching emphasises the where.  It's semi-necessary though in supposedly good coding style because the struct "should" have a solid name like item and fields with solid names like "weight", meaning that accessing a couple things is: (item-weight i) (item-value i) etc. instead of: (car i) (cadr i) This verbosity encourages the use of the matcher, (define-match (item w v) i Yet that is nearly as long in total character length as the long accessors thanks to deeffiinnneee-maaattchhh, and forever ties w to whatever happens to be in the left-most position. Pattern matching issues aside, I believe Racket could benefit from chopping 50% of the letters out of its identifiers. list-ref = nth define = def define-values = defs define-X = def-X apply = app vector-set! = vec! set-box! = box! (in general, the "!" indicates a setter, so do away with the "set-") print = pr display = disp string-X = str-X append-map = map* / mappend / mapp null? = nil? lambda = delete entirely, because pressing ctrl+\ and getting an actual lambda is vastly superior, or replace with "\" to keep it simple <div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 06/10/2013 02:28 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote: </div> <blockquote cite="mid:4AE6A351-4375-40EA-A9AB-9054CAC367A3@ccs.neu.edu" type="cite"> <div> <div>On Jun 10, 2013, at 1:49 PM, Sean Kanaley wrote:</div> <blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: 'Lucida Grande'; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "> But if I had to choose which language seems to actually produce better code, I would have to side with PicoLisp. </blockquote> </div> <div>I wonder whether we could implement pico as a language and then write </div> <div> </div> <div> #lang racket/pico </div> <div> </div> <div>and just reuse the PicoLisp code. </div> </blockquote> </body> </html>