Subject: Re: RFC: Lisp/Scheme with less parentheses through Python-like significant indentation? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/08/11 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3175018120252289@naggum.net> * Russell Wallace <rwallace@esatclear.ie> | I'm curious, can you elaborate on this? I found Ada to have even more | redundancy than the other Pascal family languages. I think the difference is in what is redundant in Ada vs Pascal. In Pascal (which I used with the UCSD p-system some time before 1980), I tended to jot down skeletal code that could easily be fleshed out when typing it in. In Ada (ca 1985), I found that much more was too important to trust to memory. My Pascal pseudo-code was nowhere near useful as code, but my Ada pseudo-code tended to be fragments of real code surrounded by comments that would be implemented. It could just be that Ada needed more concentation on my part, but I kind of doubt that as the fundamental cause. Ada is a very verbose language, but somehow, most of it needs to be said. Pascal never had that "if you don't write this down, you'll forget it and waste time reconstructing it" feeling. Note that I didn't discover this dissimilarity. It was pointed out to me several years later (probably after 1990) how my hand-written code was more than mere assistence to memory. Taking good notes is an art, and getting good at it requires some guidance to avoid wasting time, and so I think that how you take notes about a design or algorithm in various languages says something about how close that language is to how you think. Sorry for being so unspecific and vague, but it's the best I can recall, and I haven't been thinking about this for a decade or so. #:Erik -- If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.