• exu@feditown.comEnglish
    63·
    11 hours ago

    Does that make Lisp a language with significant white space?

    • owsei@programming.dev
      6·
      8 hours ago

      yeah, the same way you can’t structuser {...}

      There has to be something to split the identifiers

    • felsiq@piefed.zipEnglish
      33·
      13 hours ago

      Lisp uses it, with the fun extra part that operators are just normal functions - so instead of foo(bar) you get (foo bar), or for operators 1+1+2 becomes (+ 1 1 2). It’s a really fun language even just for being different than most, I def recommend playing around with it if you’re looking for something new.

      • BennyInc@feddit.org
        31·
        12 hours ago

        The fun part comes from using it without syntax highlighting, so you can regularly play „find the missing paranthesis“.

      • Mika@piefed.caEnglish
        101·
        11 hours ago

        The most interesting part about Lisp is homoiconicity:

        (+ 1 1 2) is literally a list with symbol “+” and 3 numbers.

        Which allows to build the most powerful macro possible, manipulating code (with data as a tree-like structures) and changing it into whatever else at compile time.

        Now if only there was any good use for macros, this would be the best language 🙃

          • Mika@piefed.caEnglish
            31·
            10 hours ago

            Sure it’s not like it has no uses, but it’s something languages have built-in as syntax sugar or operators, and you rarely need to built your own macro for anything.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      71·
      12 hours ago

      (f x) works this way in Lisp - as in the joke - and Lisp descendants like Scheme. And then there’s Haskell which takes the whole thing a step further still.

      Also Perl, because Larry thought it would be fun(ctional). The external parentheses are technically optional in this case, but won’t break anything if included. Regular f(x) syntax is also supported there. (You could probably remake this meme with Python and Perl in first and second panels tbh.)

      And I know of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses, so the same external parentheses thing would apply if that subroutine was a function.

      • dan@upvote.au
        2·
        9 hours ago

        of at least one dialect of BASIC that allowed subroutine calls to lack their parentheses

        Did sub calls normally have parentheses in BASIC?

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
          1·
          9 hours ago

          Yes. Most early BASICs even required that any reference to a function name, in definition or calling, be preceded by an FN keyword as well as the parentheses.

          QBASIC, Visual BASIC and the related dialects of BASIC found in MS Office and LibreOffice all have slightly better syntax for defining and calling functions than the older BASICs, but they all still require parentheses on their subroutine parameter lists too.

          At best, you might be able to call a subroutine by name with no empty parentheses after it, but as soon as you need parameters, you’ll need parentheses around them.

          But like I say, there was at least one rare BASIC that didn’t need them, so I’m assuming there might have been others that I’m not aware of.

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
        3·
        10 hours ago

        And then there’s Haskell which takes the whole thing a step further still.

        Wait, what works in Haskell that doesn’t in Lisp, exactly? Are the spaces not just function composition?

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
          3·
          9 hours ago

          My mistake. I had somehow missed or forgotten that Lisp also supports currying, which is what I was thinking of as Haskell taking further. There might be other things regarding type declaration and such, but that’s a little beyond me to confirm or deny at the moment.

          • bitcrafter@programming.dev
            1·
            5 hours ago

            In Haskell, all functions are curried by default, so you can partially apply a function merely by applying it to fewer than the supported number of arguments.

            Also, it is worth noting that laziness-by-default in Haskell makes it so that you can use ordinary functions to define control structures, rather than needing to turn to metaprogramming like you do in Lisp.