Re: [PATCH] Clojure-like syntactic sugar for an anonymous function literal

[David Kastrup]

Oleh <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi Stephen,
>
>>  > >
>>  > > This is my first attempt of modifying the C source of Emacs.
>>  > > The goal is to add a new reader syntax:
>>  > >
>>  > >     #(foo bar) should translate to (short-lambda (foo bar))
>>  >
>>  > Thanks, but I'd strongly prefer not to baking this syntax into the elisp
>>  > reader.
>>
>> XEmacs is -1 on this change for the same reasons Daniel gives.
>>
>> I also don't like it because the convention is to use "#c" (where c is
>> some character) for new syntax (eg, XEmacs uses #r"" for "rawstring
>> syntax", where the benefit is huge because of the unreadability of
>> regexps in ordinary strings).
>
> Note that it only takes the "#([^\"]" spot. The "#c" convention is
> completely untouched, unless "c" is "(".
>
> Of course, I'm open to other variants, if this isn't accepted, maybe
> "#l(foo bar)". The initial suggestion would be immediately familiar to
> any Clojure programmer. Clojure is a bit more popular than Elisp,
> judging by 8000 vs 3000 questions on Stack Overflow,

Apparently we have better documentation and/or smarter users.

> and 25,000 vs 22,000 repositories on Github.

And Elisp is, after all, not a general-purpose scripting language but an
editor extension language.  At any rate, both of these numbers appear
vastly inflated.  I suspect that the "Elisp" category probably is
covered by any project that bothers with providing a major mode for
editing its files.

-- 
David Kastrup