Re: About Emacs Modernisation Project

[Alessandro Piras <laynor@gmail.com>]

LanX <lanx.perl@googlemail.com> writes:

>> Sounds Like M-expressions. It has been tried in the past in the Lisp world,
>> without much success.
>
> I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression and it's
> not quite what I was thinking of.
>
> I don't wanna _replace_ elisp with new semantics. Instead of this I'm
> thinking about trying to have automatically translated second ALGOL
> stile syntactic representation of the same code.
New semantics? I don't see any new semantics in M-expressions, but maybe
it's me.
From the examples listed:
(car lst) => car[lst]
(car (append lst1 lst2)) => car[append[lst1; lst2]]
Say you want to drop the ";" for argument separation (it's syntactic
sugar after all), and say you want to use parens instead of brackets:
car(append(lst1 lst2))
>
> So it should be possible to easily switch between these two
> representations.
>
> But thats only an idea, I'm not sure if it's really feasible.

Switching can be maybe easy, but you lose quite some power: as Pascal
said in the other post, code won't be data anymore, and it's not only a
matter of evaluating code at runtime.
__
Alessandro