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2 points by malisper 3942 days ago | link | parent

Just have brackets (maybe curly braces) use indentation sensitivty.

  def (foo x y z)
    if [and
          x = 5
          y = 10
          z = 15]
      prn "success"
      prn "failed"
instead of

  def (foo x y z)
    if (and (x = 5) (y = 10) (z = 15))
      prn "success"
      prn "failed"
or

  def (foo x y z)
    if (and (x = 5)
            (y = 10)
            (z = 10))
      prn "success"
      prn "failed"


1 point by akkartik 3942 days ago | link

But you have to have some way to suppress indent-sensitivity. How would you represent these?

  '(a reeeeeaaaally
    long line)

  def (foo a b c
           d e f)
    ..
Oh, are you suggesting suppressing indentation inside () but not inside []?

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2 points by malisper 3942 days ago | link

Yes, parens will not use indentation sensitivity, but brackets will. In that case the examples you gave would be valid code.

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1 point by akkartik 3942 days ago | link

Ok, interesting idea that I hadn't considered before.

As it happens, I've been watching a discussion about a different use for brackets: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4879. Lots of people (scheme, clojure, this liso guy) seem to have an idea about what to use brackets for, and it's not clear what the best use is for these precious punctuation characters.

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2 points by malisper 3941 days ago | link

I realized that we actually don't need to have a closing bracket to signal the end of the expression. We just need to implement something like the $ operator in haskell.

  def (foo a b c)
    if $ and
           a = 5
           b = 10
           c = 15
      prn "success"
      prn "failed"
There should be enough information based off of the indentation to tell how it should be parsed. $ should mean something along the lines of everything indented after the next symbol is a single expression.

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2 points by akkartik 3941 days ago | link

You'll like the old discussion on Bullet which had some similar ideas, including considering how to suppress paren-insertion inside such a special operator, etc.

http://web.archive.org/web/20120210015823/http://seertaak.po... (http://arclanguage.org/item?id=15769; http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/pekx5/bullet_ad...)

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