bug#52063: 28.0.60; Confusing presentation of lambda

[Stefan Monnier via "Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the Swiss army knife of text editors" <bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org>]

Lars Ingebrigtsen [2021-11-27 15:17:39] wrote:
> Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:
>> I object to linking the two issues because one is about the `lambda`
>> expressions in source code and the other is about runtime representation
>> of function values and the two are fundamentally distinct (e.g. most
>> runtime function values are compiled).
>
> I agree in principle, but the original confusion here was that the
> runtime representation didn't resemble the source code sufficiently.
> You suggested making the runtime representation more similar to the
> source code, and I suggested making it even more similar.

I'm OK with making the printed representation similar to the
source code.  But when that is in turn used to motivate changes to the
source code, I think it's gone too far.
It's hard enough to design good source syntax without such constraints.

Also, I think it's good if the source syntax is a bit different from the
function value syntax: we want the two to be *similar* so the function
value feels familiar and can intuitively be understood, but we also want
to make it clear that we're looking at something
fundamentally different.

That's why I'd favor a representation of the form #[...] or #<...> or ...


        Stefan