FAQ terminology harmonisation

[James Hague]

>> Lisp has grown crusty in certain ways and can be awkward
>> after using more modern functional syntax
>
>the major problem i have with erlang vs lisp is erlangs
>syntax. it is not sufficiently symetric, i suppose
>(i prefer matching start-stop markers). and i have a
>terrible time remembering if i should use ;/, or
>not, in case statements.

Yes, I agree with that.  I've wondered how Erlang would be with Python and
Haskell's "significant whitespace" as an alternative to all the commas and
semicolons (ah, the endless debates that would start).  Writing a
preprocessor to do the conversion to proper Erlang would be an easy project.

My quibble with Lisp's syntax is less about delimiters and more about the
lack of shortcuts that I've gotten used to:

* Being able to introduce a local without explicitly declaring it and
starting a new indentation level.
* Pattern matching to destructure data into components.
* Tuples, especially using tuples to return multiple values (as opposed to
multiple-value-bind).

James