Re: Reader option to permit brackets as parentheses

[Greg Badros <gjb@cs.washington.edu>]

Chris Bitmead <cbitmead@ozemail.com.au> writes:

<snip>

> I fail to see how it makes more readable code. Apart from anything else
> your code will look alien to every other scheme programmer on the
> planet. Can that be more readable? It would also make writing the code

This isn't at *all* true.  LOTS of scheme programmers are brought up
using instructional Scheme environments that permit [] as parentheses,
and are accustomed to having certain constructs in [] instead of ().

> more difficult. When to use a [] and when to use () ? You'll spend half
> your day exchanging bracket types trying to make it more asthetically
> pleasing. Write a text editor that does colour matching on parenthesis
> or something.

Clearly you aren't convinced, and I believe you're probably in the
majority among this list's readers, but I've lately been teaching scheme 
in an undergraduate programming languages course here at the UW and the
students definitely seem to like the ability to use [], and find my
examples more clear when I reliably and consistently use [] in certain
special forms (e.g., let bindings).

Bottom line is I thought the option would be nice.  I'd expect it to be
pretty easy to verify empirically that programmers (especially novice
ones) can better understand Scheme programs that use [] reliably and
consistently.  (And I hypothesize little harm by random use of paird []
instead of () ).

So... my lips are sealed until I either have time to run the experiment
or can reference someone who has studied the issue empirically. :-)

Greg