Super-dee-duper D features

[Sean Kelly]

cracki wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I see:
>>>    1- x
>>> in the Lisp code, and have to mentally translate it to:
>>>    x - 1
>>> and not:
>>>    1 - x
>>>
>>> This just hurts my brain.
>> I thought Lisp used prefix notation, but the above syntax looks like
>> element composition.
>>
>>
>> Sean
> 
> 
> nah. reading s-expressions needs some getting used to. you're reading
> serialized tree structure there after all.
> 
> the "1-" is the name of a function. instead of writing
> 
> 	(1- x)
> 
> you could of couse define a function "subtract-one" that does the same
> and then write
> 
> 	(subtract-one x)
> 
> but that's not much more readable. you can of course write
> 
> 	(- x 1)
> 
> and any lisp compiler optimizes it.

Oh okay.  For some reason I was still thinking in terms of C symbol 
names.  I'm going to have to remember that position is really all that 
matters in Lisp :-)


Sean