Re: The beauty of LATEX

On 10/23/2011 7:49 AM, Joel de Guzman wrote:
> On 10/23/2011 4:15 AM, Dave Abrahams wrote:

>> Especially if you're inspired by S-expressions, I can't imagine any good
>> excuse to invent a new syntax when lisp already has a syntax for this
>> sort of thing.  If we need to use square brackets instead of round ones
>> for legacy (or other) reasons, that's fine, but I don't at all see why
>> it makes sense to choose a syntax where of all things there's no outer
>> set of parens around the entire
>> function/macro/template/whatever-you-call-this-thing.  Why not do this:
>>
>>   [def foo[a] [a]]
> 
> You are right Dave. I totally mixed it up! My concern was legacy
> Qbk code. I wanted something that can be applied to legacy code
> using simple grep. But I fumbled and mixed it up. I see that
> the old syntax has the syntax you wrote! I'll fix it.

Following scheme/lisp more closely, that should be:

  [def [foo a] [a]]

(Fine. That should still be grep-able).

Now we have it very close to scheme including the dot notation
for variable args. E.g.

  [decl [table title . rows]]

and lambda. E.g.:

  [lambda [x] [dup [x]]]

(http://pastebin.com/2vQmGyHF)

I think were close to a nice scheme-ish syntax while still being
friendly to migration of legacy quickbook code.

Regards,
-- 
Joel de Guzman
http://www.boostpro.com
http://boost-spirit.com