[erlang-questions] LFE - Lisp Flavoured Erlang released

[Mikael Pettersson]

Yariv Sadan writes:
 > Robert, this is very cool. I already started playing with LFE and it's
 > great. Thanks a lot for sharing it.
 > 
 > I have a couple of suggestions:
 > 
 > - it would be nice to have a preprocessor/parse transform that converts the form
 > 
 > (foo:bar baz ..)
 > 
 > to
 > 
 > (: foo bar baz ...)
 > 
 > I find the former much more readable.

This I can agree with, as long as we're only talking about
literal module and function names, not general expressions.

 > - It would like to have an Erlang-style '=' operator for binding
 > instead of (let). The main difference is in the number of parentheses
 > and the scoping rules. So, instead of
 > 
 > (let ((a 1) (b 2)) (+ a b))
 > 
 > you could write
 > 
 > (= (a 1) (b 2))
 > (+ a b)

NO! Absolutely no fricking way.
The way Erlang (ab)uses the '=' sign to do bindings is
IMNSHO one of the ugliest flaws in the language, in part
because it isn't structurally lexical scoped (bindings
flow /out/ of expressions, not just into them).

The point of Lisp/Scheme-like S-expression syntax is not
just using parenthesis for grouping, but also using the
structure to express scoping. LET-expressions do that,
your '=' abuse would not.