🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <26463@castle.ed.ac.uk> jamesh@castle.ed.ac.uk (James Hammerton) writes:
   Nor to me, but I think that it is a bad example to use anyway. So lets
   try something to show the readability a bit better.  Consider the
   factorial function ...

You're on a sticky wicket if you are going to argue anything using
something the size of factorial as an example.  As has already been
pointed out, anything that uses HOF in SML will end up looking
remarkably similar to the Lisp notation.  Anyway, this is tangential,
the following is the real issue :-

   [ lots of material that discusses "nice" syntactic features of ML ]

Fine, but it misses the point of tmb's article which was that Lisp
notation allows a program to manipulate _itself_ much more simply than
most other notations.  However, assuming you have a parser/unparser
for some form of abstract syntax (as Dave McQueen has stated NJ/SML
will have) there is no real difference between the two as far as
manipulation goes.

bevan