Thinking on a new syntax for #Scheme.

[aartaka@merveilles.town]

Thinking on a new syntax for #Scheme. Distinguishing feature: insignificant indentation! Because it’s hard to edit #Wisp in ed.

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@aartaka Since Scheme is in some respects a dialect of ALGOL, just replace all the parens with BEGIN/END, & any uppercased symbol has an implicit BEGIN.

DEFINE tf LAMBDA BEGIN test END
IF EQUAL? test #t END
DISPLAY "yes" END
DISPLAY "no" END
END END END

#scheme #algol #end

[restorante@social.linux.pizza]

@mdhughes

But, does that mean the majority of 'modern' programming languages are all descendant of ALGOL?

That is very interesting. I read some ALGOL code and I love them.

@aartaka

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@restorante @aartaka Pretty much, but most just took the control structures from ALGOL, not lexical scoping or function references. Scheme got all of it.

Like, C is a mix of ASM & ALGOL, & some FORTRAN-isms.

[kirtai@tech.lgbt]

@mdhughes @restorante @aartaka
I have to wonder how much Smalltalk got.

[cdegroot@mstdn.ca]

@kirtai @mdhughes @restorante @aartaka Smalltalk's control structures are pretty much all higher-order polymorphic functions. I mean, it's a functional language in OO-clothing, so I'd call it quite far from ALGOL.

My modern favorite Lisp-with-ALGOL syntax is Elixir, btw. And don't forget that LISP 2, which never happened, was slated to have ALGOL syntax so you're standing on the shoulders of giants if you do that