Re: rough first impressions

[James Knight <jknight@xxxxxxxx>]

On Monday, April 14, 2003, at 12:12  PM, Jonathan Bachrach wrote:
> actually what i was thinking was changing goo over to using case 
> sensitivity and having all caps be the convention for types.  this 
> saves characters and is pretty standard and lets you name the 
> constructors by lowercasing the type name.
Why can't you simply make calling the type object itself act as the 
constructor? (idea borrowed from python (which in turn I'm sure 
borrowed it from someone else)). I'm not entirely sure what that would 
entail for the implementation but it sounds like a good idea without 
thinking of the details. :)

E.g. (isa? (vec 1 2 3 4) vec) => #t

Or, if you want to make types capitalized, since it's nice to have a 
naming _convention_ (ie: not syntax) that distinguishes different kinds 
of things,

(isa? (Vec 1 2 3 4) Vec)) => #t

> lots of lispers object to case sensitivity and using the shift key 
> (except to type parentheses).

I assume 'hard-core' lispers remap the [] keys to (). ;)

James