Re (tilly) 1: Lisp Rocks

Observations.

You have not picked up the Lisp parenthesizing style yet. Do so. It helps. (You let the parens pile up and let your editor pair them for you.)
Your logic is nesting waaay too deep. Lisp, even more than Perl, is lots of little functions that call each other.
To help the structuring of your program, think of your entire program as being the building of a model in which your problem is easily solved. And of course when you build the model you approach it the same way.
Remember, most of Lisp is written in Lisp, and in any significant piece of Lisp code you expect to add customizations to the language for your needs. This again affects how much you need to nest it.

BTW was it fun? :-)

Comment on Re (tilly) 1: Lisp Rocks

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Re: Re (tilly) 1: Lisp Rocks by hding (Chaplain) on May 24, 2001 at 02:35 UTC
I basically agree with Tilly. Almost always parentheses should not appear on a line by themselves (don't line them up like you would line up {} in Perl, etc.). You just pile them up at the end of a line until you've closed off the expression that you're finishing (a decent editor will highlight the starting parens so that you know when you're done). Then just let the editor do the indenting and you should have reasonably well formatted code. You probably do need to break things down more - I don't think I have anything with more than about 7 or 8 closing parens in my Lisp code, and even that is pretty rare. (Disclaimer: I don't necessarily want to present my Lisp code as being particularly good. It does its job, though. :-) For a book with lots of good example (Common) Lisp code, see Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Norvig (which is of interest to anyone programming in Common Lisp, even those with no interest in AI). Paul Graham's books are pretty good too, but some of the code is considerably more abstruse.	[reply]
Re: Re (tilly) 1: Lisp Rocks by japhy (Canon) on May 23, 2001 at 23:08 UTC
`<SNL who="chris farley">`Why, THANK YOU Pepper Boy! That was JUST the right amount of pepper I needed!`</SNL>` `japhy` -- Perl and Regex Hacker	[reply]