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Comment by weknowbetter

7 hours ago

This drives me nuts. I love LISP but refuse to pretend writing `)))))))` is reasonable.

My editor (emacs) shows how I close the scopes and it is easy enough. I'm not sure why writing

    )
      )
        )
          )
            )

would be so much better.

Why are you writing ')))))' instead of your closing parenthesis being autogenerated. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

  • The 2026 version is: Why are you writing Lisp instead of your code being autogenerated. Sounds like a recipe for failure.

))))))) isn't so bad, but )))))))) is just getting ridiculous. You have to draw the line somewhere

picolisp has an interesting solution to this. A single ']' will close all open )'s for that block of code

  • That has to be a nightmare for parsers lol

    • not really. it's just pop all of the stack and return to depth 0. you can still detect imbalanced parens, but i'm not sure how it affects the provenance question of where a missing one would point out in errors.