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RE: One Thousand Numerals

Replying to perplexing.space

I used to really think format and loop destroyed the beauty of Lisp but these days I love them. I’m not really sure what and when changed that.

I look at my previous view as overly fixating on the surface-semantics of the syntactic structure of hierarchical, tree shaped lists. Sort of cargo culting that hierarchy and structure as if it were a good fit for loops and formats even though that’s not necessarily always the case. While it can be a good map sometimes (I’ve had some problem domains addressed very well by something like Alex Shinn’s fmt combinators) that’s not inherently true for all DSLs.

xj, an example of where fmt fit perfectly

Lisp is just very well suited for DSLs both nested and flat. srfi-42 is a long-standing fave of mine, and that has a few levels of nesting. Chicken’s run/shell system has only two levels inherently (one list per command) although since it’s quasiquoted and you might want to use generation to piece together the commands the nesting can get pretty deep. But that goes for loop too; the arguments to the macro are still expressions and as such can be nested.

Uh, TL;DR: no need to inject extra parens when they’re not needed♥