Accessible Programming

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 20:09:16 UTC, Cym13 wrote:
> On Saturday, 10 November 2018 at 04:04:39 UTC, Chris Katko 
> wrote:
>> lul @ the number of people who say LISP and S-impressions 
>> (coincidentally their favorite language!) is somehow easier to 
>> read for the visually impaired.
>>
>> I personally love reading
>>
>> (((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((this
>>  )))))))))))))code))))))
>>
>> with my less-than-ideal eyes.
>
> I suppose it's because since most punctuation is parentheses 
> you don't rely on what the punctuation is as much as how the 
> code is laid out, and although I'm not visually impaired myself 
> I could see why indentation is easier to grasp than determining 
> which kind of specific symbol was used at a very specific place.

Correct. You generally don't look at the parens at all, other 
than the pairs within the same line. The editor is then 
responsible for indenting the code correctly.

People who write lots of lisp will often use special editor 
addons, such as paredit, which operate on sexps instead of 
lines/characters. That would be impractical for languages with a 
very heterogeneous syntax, like D.