Re: learning Emacs Lisp

[Lennart Borgman]

On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Richard Riley <rileyrgdev@gmail.com> wrote:
>> That darn old emacs again ! Seriously this has more to do with lisp in
>> general than specifically with elisp. I doubt you'd find any _one_ serious
>> programmer or author in the whole lisp community who proposes this kind of
>> style ( each closing paren on a seperate line ).
>
> You will notice that I did not propose it. I said the standard is hard
> for me to read as someone who is not an eLisp magician. I still do not
> understand (other than the reasons I postulated about above) why it is
> as it is. I find it very hard to indent and match (ok, emacs helps with
> matching brackets), but would find it very difficult to read from a
> printout for example. But this is more my lack of experience
> possibly. All hindrances can become less so with experience. But would
> aligned brackets really hurt anyone? I dont think so. It is convention
> (and convention is a good thing at times) which has the style as it
> is. Or?

I think that most elisp programmers will look at the indentation when
reading the code on paper. You can compare with python where only the
indentation matters. I do not like that, but the combination of
indentation (for the eyes) and parenthesis (for the parser) seems very
good to me.