In Lisp, you just have () and they are always in the same place, meaning the same thing.
I love Lisp and have gotten more good constructive feedback from the Lisp community than anywhere else (with the Haskell community being a close second), but I don't understand why there's only been a dozen or so serious attempts to do Lisp without parens (I-Expressions being the best so far, better than the subsequent Wisp, etc). There should be 1,000x attempts.
This should be the top priority of most Lisp researchers. I of course think my Tree Notation is the solution, but I could easily be wrong, and there could be a better way, but the () need to go!
Because Lisp is not about 'parens', but that code is written in a serialized form of Lisp data and that it can be both written as externalized textual data and as actual data (by calling functions which work directly over this data).
> dozen or so serious attempts to do Lisp without parens
MLISP, Lisp2, Logo, ML, Clisp, Dylan, RLISP, SKILL, CGOL, Julia, ...
> This should be the top priority of most Lisp researchers.
There are many more interesting areas for progress. A Lisp without s-expression-based syntax is not a main Lisp and will form a new language group - which has happened multiple times in the past - but it won't replace the main core Lisp languages.
For me, using parens is not a deal-breaker, as it's a relatively simple to use for dividing up things. Beats using invisible characters or many different characters.
