Subject: Re: Dangling Closing Parentheses vs. Stacked Closing Parentheses
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 2000/03/29
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3163278794398146@naggum.no>

* Dorai Sitaram
| Well, the CLISP pretty-printer gives this "semi-dangled" output:
:
| But if you look closer, you will realize with a jolt that the lparen that
| an rparen lines up with is _not_ its matching lparen...

  someone recently said (sorry, I have been skimming news lately) that he
  had a problem starting with Lisp because everything was in uppercase --
  small things like that can effectively block one's entry into new areas.
  back when I was fairly new to Lisp (eons and eons ago, of course), I came
  across CLISP and its unf<beep>ingbelievably braindamaged pretty printer.
  it was immediately obvious that this had been implemented in a vacuum,
  free from influence from all knowledgable programmers on the planet and
  beyond, and it still sucked.  to see code printed like this was such a
  horrible experience I immediately seized upon the source code to try to
  find out how to turn this gut-wrenching abomination off.  but what did I
  find?  the entire source code was formatted like this!  aaaaauuugh!  and
  everything in German, to boot.  the abyss was staring back at me.  <fade>

  CLISP has since improved.  no animals have been hurt in its production.

#:Erik