Re: Improving aesthetics & readability of backquote

[Paul W. Rankin]

On Tue, May 21 2019, Richard Stallman wrote:

> ,@b is obviously something magic; people who don't know what it 
> does will look up what it means.
>
> (splice b) looks like an expression, so people will assume it 
> calls the function 'splice', and get confused. I think we should 
> not implement that alias.

I think it would be a worthwhile experiment to run this theory by 
a non-programmer, or a non-Lisp programmer, because this is just 
not how people think. This distinction between "expression" and 
"function" and "construct"... people who haven't spent most of 
their lives programming Lisp just don't think in those terms. 
Instead we think of the first element inside parentheses as "this 
does a thing". We look at something like the above and think 
"splice does a thing". The notion that confusion will arise 
because (splice b) can only be called within a (quoteval ...), and 
that this confusion will supersede the confusion of "what the heck 
is ,@b??" is just not realistic.

And there are many times when the first element inside parentheses 
actually does *not* do a thing, e.g.

   (let ((a 1) (b 2)) ...)    ;; a and b don't do things

   (dolist (var list) ...)    ;; var doesn't do a thing

But "quoteval", "unquote" and "splice" are just suggestions based 
on the backquote documentation. If these suggestions are too 
troubling, maybe divide this into two parts: 1. the backquote 
syntax is ugly and hard to understand, and 2. here's a way it 
could be better. Feel free to discard 2.

--
https://www.paulwrankin.com