Re: rough first impressions

On Mon, 2003-04-14 at 15:50, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:
> One thing that impresses me about this discussion is the way it ignores 
> the common availability of monitors that will do 1600 x 1200. In a 
> reasonable font (say, 10 or 12 point) that's a whole lot of columns 
> across the page.

The advantage of compactness in syntax for me isn't so much in saving
screen real estate as it is in mental parsability.  Lisp's homogeneous
syntax already poses a bit of a problem here with its lack of bold
syntactic markers.  Having really-long-and-painfully-explicit-names
doesn't help much because it spreads the code across such a wide space. 
Emacs default lisp indentation makes it worse.

Different brains will doubtless disagree.

I've been thinking a lot about syntax recently and it seems kind of
intuitive that a good syntax will have a huffman-like relationship to
the information in the syntax.  Common constructs should be short.  Rare
or unusual constructs should be longer and stick out.  However, if the
common constructs are short it becomes all the more important for them
to be easy to distinguish.  I guess that's the reason I have an initial
dislike for d{f,g,m,v,etc} because they are so common and look so much
alike but do such different things.

-- 
Miles Egan <[email protected]>

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