Comment by Turing_Machine
12 days ago
> It is quite hard to even tell a noun from a verb
What?
Unless the list is quoted or something, the first item after the opening paren is always the "verb", yes?
12 days ago
> It is quite hard to even tell a noun from a verb
What?
Unless the list is quoted or something, the first item after the opening paren is always the "verb", yes?
There's nothing stopping any other item from being a verb, no? (Not the verb, but a verb.) Anything involving higher order functions?
In the context of the verb, everything else is a noun. When you understand what the verb does, then you can care about the difference between a verb and a noun.
Certainly, but the original quote was "It is quite hard to even tell a noun from a verb" (emph. added), and this is correct, you can't tell whether an identifier refers to a function or variable in Scheme by sight alone. This seems desirable if one wants first-class functions, and is very much an intentional choice for Scheme, but it can admittedly be more difficult to build up a mental model of new code if you have no idea what's a variable and what's a function (esp. amidst an already-difficult-to-grok sea of parentheses).
Notably, this isn't intrinsic to Lisps - Common Lisp uses a different syntax and namespace for function names and variables. My understanding is that Scheme et al's decision to merge the namespaces/syntax was not without controversy in the Lisp community (the Lisp-1 v Lisp-2 debate).[0]
[0] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Technical-Issues.html
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