There's really just one justification, but it really is an interesting one: It gets the logical structure of the code in line with its lexical structure.
One reason this is neat is that it facilitates language extensibility to a radical degree. LISP has its macros, FORTH has its compiling words. Languages that allow infix syntax have tried to come up with something similar, but I haven't personally used one that I thought was particularly successful.
The weird thing is that some people feel that they need to find all kinds of justifications for why not having an infix syntax is OK.
Arithmetic in Lisp-style is excellent and easy to read. Thing is that programming languages infix math is ridiculously bad compared to what I can do with paper and pencil. It's really just a really bad form of imitation and to me that irks me way more than just doing it in Lisp. Math written in PL:s is hard to read in general and I'd love to see an Emacs package that lets you show an inline picture as you mark a mathematical expression of LaTeX rendering it as 'regular' math.
There are a lot of reasons to prefer RPN over infix syntax and why Lisp has chosen to adopt this notation. Although, I agree with the critiques of the article, it's not really saying much.
chr1|11 years ago
The fact that arithmetic can be written in weird form in other languages too isn't very interesting.
bunderbunder|11 years ago
One reason this is neat is that it facilitates language extensibility to a radical degree. LISP has its macros, FORTH has its compiling words. Languages that allow infix syntax have tried to come up with something similar, but I haven't personally used one that I thought was particularly successful.
emiljbs|11 years ago
Arithmetic in Lisp-style is excellent and easy to read. Thing is that programming languages infix math is ridiculously bad compared to what I can do with paper and pencil. It's really just a really bad form of imitation and to me that irks me way more than just doing it in Lisp. Math written in PL:s is hard to read in general and I'd love to see an Emacs package that lets you show an inline picture as you mark a mathematical expression of LaTeX rendering it as 'regular' math.
Morgawr|11 years ago
jimbokun|11 years ago