Question

Being a newbie to Lisp I’m wondering if the Lisp syntax could be ‘fixed’?

Some people say the syntax in Lisp is one of its biggest strengths. I don’t quite understand this.

Isn’t it possible to replace ‘obvious’ parentheses with a combination of white spaces, new lines and indenting? Just like in Python?

It looks to me like parentheses are the most used characters in Lisp code. I’m wondering if that’s true – but if it is, isn’t this a suggestion, that there is some redundancy in the syntax?

Is there some simple answer to the question – why so many parentheses?

For example:

(defun factorial (x)     (if (= x 0)         1         (* x             (factorial (- x 1))))) 

Why not:

defun factorial (x)   if (= x 0)     1     * x       factorial         - x 1 

e.g. close parentheses at the end of line, and always open them on new lines. Only the 1 would be ambiguous – is it 1 or (1) – but we could introduce an exception – single tokens are not ‘listified’.

Could this work?

Edit:

Thank you all! I see now there are some links at the lispin site.

Answer 1

What you suggest appears to have been implemented in Lispin

Edit: sindikat points out in the comments below that the link is no longer valid. Here’s the last valid version of the site from the Web Archive: http://wayback.archive.org/web/20080517144846id_/http://www.lispin.org/