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From: gjr@hplgr2.hpl.hp.com (Guillermo (Bill) J. Rozas)
Subject: Re: lisp resistance: lack of visual cues?
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In-Reply-To: gray@heimdal.ml.csiro.au's message of Sun, 14 Jan 1996 21:59:56 GMT
Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 18:40:07 GMT
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In article <u1wx6ufndv.fsf@heimdal.ml.csiro.au> gray@heimdal.ml.csiro.au (Randall Gray) writes:

|   On reflection, I think that this may be due to the lack of cues: when
|   one looks at an Algol-like syntax one sees a structure inherent in the
|   "words" that make it up.  Looking at a <lisp family> program can be
|   like looking at line noise -- lots of repeated characters interspersed
|   with what may or may not be random characters.

I have yet to see an "obfuscated scheme" contest.

I think that readability has much more to do with judicious
indentation and appropriate identifiers than with the actual syntactic
tokens used to delimit constructs.

Unfortunately people follow terrible indentation rules and use cryptic
names in every programming language.  Perhaps when you do that a
little additional syntactic nonsense in the language increases
readability marginally, but isn't it better to fix the real problem?
