Re: Very poor Lisp performance

Christophe Rhodes wrote:
> Jon Harrop <usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> Is Lisp code not made less maintainable because of all those brackets?
>
> No, it is made more maintainable because of all those brackets,
> because it is straightforward to write tools which can manipulate the
> textual representation of your program, and because human programmers
> do not read the brackets.

I don't think that makes sense. Continuing that line of thinking, Whitespace
and Brainf*** are the most maintainable languages.

Consider the example:

(defun fib (x)
(if (<= x 2)
1
(+ (fib (- x 2))(fib (1- x)))))

In ML this is:

let fib x = if x<=2 then 1 else fib(x-2) + fib(x-1)

That may be easier to parse for the machine (I don't think it is though) but
maintainability is about how easily a human can parse it.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Very poor Lisp performance
    ... >>> Is Lisp code not made less maintainable because of all those brackets? ... > maintainability is about how easily a human can parse it. ... problem because I assume the precedence rules are sane and that the ML ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)
  • Re: Very poor Lisp performance
    ... >> Is Lisp code not made less maintainable because of all those brackets? ... > maintainability is about how easily a human can parse it. ... Is readability simply a subjective measure, ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)