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From: Martti Halminen <martti.halminen@kolumbus.fi>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: I want to ask you All an advice, please
Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 17:30:34 +0200
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Date: 2002-11-14T17:30:34+02:00
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Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> In comp.lang.ada Fred Gilham <gilham@snapdragon.csl.sri.com> wrote:
> 
> :     o simple syntax[2]

> 
> If you can't accept that this may be considered syntax (also),
> then consider that "human stacks" are pretty bad in bracket
> matching. After all there is a reason that we write many small functions
> and not a few big ones. I believe that too many ()s will make you crazy
> and not very productive.

What makes you think that it would be any different in Lisp? In my
programs the average size of a lisp function is less than 15 lines.

> How many levels of nested function application can a human being
> remember? Try
>   (+ 3 (* 4 (+ 7 6 (- 5 1)) (/ 4 (+ 5 6)))
> "by hand" for an easy example. The tree isn't unusually high.

Few Lisp programmers would write it like that.

(+ 3 (* 4
	(+ 7 6 (- 5 1))
	(/ 4 (+ 5 6))))
would be more likely to be found in actual code.
The trick in reading Lisp is to leave the bellyaching about parentheses
to the compiler and editor, and use the indentation to read the code
structure.

--