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cool experiment, but whitespace is a terrible delineator. ironically one of the most disliked parts of lisp by newcomers, the parens, ends up becoming its greatest strength once you have grokked things.


I used to feel the same way, but after learning Haskell I think whitespace is particularly suited for functional programming languages.


Works well in F# too!


I’m used to whitespace as a delineator thanks to python. If used judiciously it can be a great benefit.

I do admit it would be nice if it were optional so you could have more complicated expressions than you can easily write with paired brackets/braces/parentheses.


If used judiciously, it doesn't find its way into a programming language design.


I'mremindedofthehistoricalobservationthattheRomanswroteandreadlatinwithnospaces,makingCaesaralinguisticgeniusforthefeatofeasilyreadingletterswithoutspeakingoutloud,whenIreadabsolutistcommentsonwhitespacelikethis.

Editor fonts which replace spaces and tabs with what are essentially the appropriate periods or similar make this not a merely hypothetical or anachronistic point.


You can do that in wisp: Inside parentheses (and strings), whitespace processing is halted.

define : proc

  display (string-append "foo"

    "bar" (format #f "foo~a" 2)

     ) ; is valid wisp
(it would be valid wisp without the indentation in the parentheses, but it would look weird)

(empty lines added to prevent hn from stripping newlines)




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