

Ask HN: Postfix sexps? - blintson

I'm a beginner, so perhaps my method is an artifact of that; but I tend to write functions inside-out. I start with the simplest case and work my way out. Make sure an item is parsed correctly, then loop it, then call it from something, etc. etc.. 
My idea is pretty simple; make the language accommodate that. 
For ex.:
(defun insert5()
  (dotimes 5 
    (insert "foo"))) 
becomes
((("foo" insert)
    5 dotimes)
      () insert5 defun)<p>Only problem I can think of w/ doing things this way is that finding function declarations could be hard<i>. I really, really think this could work a lot better. Anybody out there done something like this? How did it work? Any big problems with it?
If anybody out there's got a PLT scheme or elisp implementation of this could you post a link?<p>I think we use prefix notation because of English. Japanese is more like this, almost always w/ the verb at the end of the sentence.<p></i>I hope to be using autocompletion, or something to parse the source code in the future to avoid having to read the code for functions, so for me (I hope) this shouldn't be an issue.<p><i></i>Joke: here's the FIRST line of NASA's
scheme shuttle-control script:
(((((((((((((((((((((((((((
======
khafra
Let me introduce you to Reverse Polish Lisp:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPL_(programming_language)>

Not everything is postfix, but it has some elements of that, to parallel the
reverse polish notation.

