nemesis wrote:

> They both look insane to me. ;)

OK, fair enough.

>>> You may eventually learn about Haskell's ancestry...
>>
>> AFAIK, Haskell is basically Miranda(tm) with a few minor 
>> modifications. (Oh, and type classes.)
> 
> Yes, but ML was the one to really begin it all.  OCaml is it's current 
> popular iteration, as well as F# from Microsoft.

I haven't really looked at OCaml.

I looked at Clean. (It isn't.) And also F# (which seemed really ugly).

>> I think you'd need to colour code expressions by depth or something to 
>> really make sense of that. Really deeply nested expressions are 
>> difficult to parse visually.
> 
> Not at all.  Prefix syntax makes everything very clear:  most everything 
> in the begining of a list is a function or macro and the rest are 
> arguments, like
> (+ 1 i) or ((lambda (x) (* x x)) 3)

I'm having trouble seeing which thing a given subexpression is the 
argument to. To do that, you have to count brackets. It's not 
impossible, just not very easy.

>> (I also imagine that without assistence it would be very hard to make 
>> all the parentheses match up correctly...)
> 
> Not at all, if notepad is all you got, just be sure to always open and 
> close in sequence, then position between and continue typing.  Of 
> course, I won't comment on identation in this case. :D
> 
> But any slightly advanced editor gives you parentheses matching for free.

SciTE gives me paren matching, but apparently it doesn't understand 
Haskell syntax, so it fails to comprehend that anything inside quote 
marks is a literal string and so shouldn't be matched against... :-S

Maybe I should go write a text editor of my own...

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