21 March 2013

Interesting project: they want to make Lisp usable by formatting it as if it where Python: the level of indentation would take the meaning of the level of bracket nesting. The Readable S-Lisp expression project

Now some people like me can’t get used to pythonic indentation, but others might find that this is a great feature that could enable Lisp to jump into the 21st century.

Another interesting input format

The concepts of graphical programming languages so far has not been a great success, however here is an interesting combination of graphical elements and text based syntax ; the Boxer programming language here the graphical element (the box) is used as a substitute for syntactic construct: drawn boxe are used instead of scope delimiters (begin … end , { .. } etc ).

This has the utility that there are fewer occasions for syntax error.A report on Boxer

I find that the subject of alternative input formats is a very interesting one. I did not play with the Boxer language, however there is the challenge of writing a good editor that combines graphic features and text; also one needs a good debugger; etc. etc. etc. It is hard to implement a system that has both a great language and a great graphic user interface.