Re: OT: Re: [Chicken-users] rails-like framework

[Shawn Rutledge]

On 4/25/06, Pupeno <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Monday, 24 de April de 2006 22:12, Shawn Rutledge wrote:
> > A side project is how to get rid of the parentheses so that ordinary
> > people can tolerate writing Scheme.
> Getting rid of parenthesis is dangerous, people may forget that while writting
> Scheme programs you are doing it as Scheme data and that programs are no more
> than a tree (build up with cons... lists if you like).

OK, so the concept that data and code are the same is important, but
the parentheses are just there because pre-order syntax with variable
numbers of arguments requires some kind of delimiter.  (And HP
calculator users take the opposite stance that RPN is so wonderful
precisely because you don't need delimiters.)  I think teaching the
concept requires some thought about the structure in memory; it's way
more important than the ASCII syntax.  The books use diagrams to show
this, yet there is no editor to let you interactively modify memory by
manipulating diagrams.  (And then there is the related issue that
keyboarding is faster than mousing.  So you just have to make the
diagram manipulation similarly efficient by keyboard.  MathCAD
achieved this, for math expressions.  I used to use it on DOS, without
a mouse.)