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Here's a simple idea for more readable s-expressions.
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| Imagine that you have lisp envy, but your brain can't quite handle all | |
| the parentheses. Here's my idea for more readable s-expressions. | |
| When you begin parsing, you start in terminator mode. In terminator | |
| mode, an expression is a series of space separated expressions | |
| terminated by a newline or semicolon: | |
| print "hello" | |
| eat "tomatoes" | |
| clean "dishes" | |
| In traditional s-expressions, this would be: | |
| ((print "hello") (eat "tomatoes") (clean "dishes")) | |
| Expressions in terminator mode can contain traditional expressions: | |
| print (str "hello, " name) | |
| And you can flip back into terminator mode with curly braces: | |
| if (< x 5) { | |
| print "now we're back in terminator mode" | |
| print "so we don't have too many parentheses" | |
| } | |
| Without curly braces, you'd stay in traditional mode in the if body: | |
| if (< x 5) ( | |
| (print "this time we stayed in traditional mode") | |
| (print "so newlines are just whitespace") | |
| (print "and complex expressions must be contained in parens") | |
| ) | |
| Now you can imagine some more complex forms that are still fairly | |
| readable: | |
| switch x ( | |
| 1 { | |
| print "x is 1" | |
| } | |
| 2 { | |
| print "x is 2" | |
| } | |
| else { | |
| if (isSpecial x) { | |
| print "x isn't 1 or 2, but it is special in some way" | |
| } else { | |
| print "I'm bored of x" | |
| } | |
| } | |
| ) | |
In my new syntax, you can write in either s-expression mode or js style mode and interchange them.
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That was basically the direction I wad going with the first version of the syntax, but i've since decided the significant newlines are more trouble than they are worth in a c style syntax.