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.

In reply to Re: Re (tilly) 1: Lisp Rocks by hding
in thread Lisp Rocks by japhy

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