On Mon, Jan 25, 2016 at 12:03:55PM +0000, Rainer Weikusat wrote:
> Ian Zimmerman <itz@???> writes:
> > On 2016-01-24 21:37 -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote:
> >> >The Lisp with M-expressions is called ML.
>
> [...]
>
> > I was not trying to say that there is a historical line of development
> > from Lisp to ML, but that a hypothetical well-designed Lisp with infix
> > syntax looks a lot like ML.
>
> The Lisp syntax is well-designed because it's uniform instead of
> sticking to centuries-old conventions for a certain shorthand notation
> which are passed down from generation to generation because ... well
> ... just because.
>
> But 'well designed' from a technical point of view is not the same as
> 'designed in order to be readily acceptable and understandable(!) by
> people used to different conventions' (however arbitrary and illogical
> these may seem to be).

Correct.

I suppose that's why the Racket variant of Scheme provides a #lang
directive at the start of a file to use a different parser than the
usual one.

-- hendrik