Red Echo

February 8, 2016

O-expressions are a new syntax for Lisp-like languages, with an implementation called Liso which is based on Racket.

I’ve been playing with similar ideas recently, from a slightly more functional-programming perspective. Everyone agrees, for the most part, that delimiter pairs create structure, and that commas have higher precedence than semicolons. The idea that any consecutive sequence of non-delimiter punctuation characters constitutes an “operator” token is useful, and I like the use of INDENT/DEDENT as another form of bracketed delimiters. Is it possible, given the additional constraint of “no reserved identifiers”, to construct a language sufficiently general that a language like Python, Javascript, or (my own) Radian could be constructed on top of it as a macro library?