Re: Relative merits of Lisp-1 vs. Lisp-2?

I mostly agree with your assessment. But note that a functional
programming style is somewhat more convenient with a Lisp-1. It's easier
to express things like (((f x) y) z) whereas in a Lisp-2 you would have
to say (funcall (funcall (f x) y) z). So if you have a strong preference
for functional programming (or would like to explore it more deeply) you
might want to try out a Lisp-1 (i.e., Scheme).

How about using a simple read-macro for this? Something along the lines
of:

(defun square-brace-reader (stream char)
(declare (ignore char))
`(funcall ,@(read-delimited-list #\] stream t)))

(set-macro-character #\[ #'square-brace-reader)

That will expand [foo bar] to (funcall foo bar), or [[(f x) y] z] to
(funcall (funcall (f x) y) z).

On one project which involved a lot of functional programming, I used a
macro like this. The version I used was slightly fancier, in that it
would also expand [f x y . z] to (apply f x y z), and I had an
additional reader macro that would expand {x y : (f y x)} to #'(lambda
(x y) (f y x)). What do you think?

A standard reference is
http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html

Thanks! This is good stuff.

.

Relevant Pages

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