I don't know what to think about all this syntax. I think it is fine for pg to look for ways to make Lisp more concise and parens-free cuz he is a master of Lisp. But is everyone piling onto this experiment as savvy about the benefits of those parnes? Or are some just trying to turn Arc into C to get back to their comfort zone?
As for it being optional, the danger I see is that this punctuation stampede is encouraging noobs in their fear of parens. The fact is, anyone who gives Lisp a serious try never ends up in week two saying damn Lisp rocks but how do you people tolerate those damn parentheses!!??
That said, I did as much punctubreviation as I could doing Arccells and I did not hate it. Time will tell....
The problem is that instead of learning Lisp/Arc people are spinning their wheels trying to design it. I see very little sign here of people actually programming in Arc. If pg had just laid down the law folks would be using Arc instead of trying to fix a language whose excellent heritage is unknown to them. But I think some good ideas came out of the first wave of suggestions so I am undecided on the merits of the dictator's three-microphone town meeting.
"won't have anything worth releasing for months..."
Er, um, dude... it's Lisp, you are supposed to be able to release it every day. Please don't tell us you are still running the system specification document past the user acceptance committees.
Well, I do not totally agree with you there. I have programmed in Arc both for fun and work, and have also coded in Scheme a little, and I really find the . and ! syntax is really a good thing for structure access, mainly when you have nested structures. You know, when you have 3 or 4 opening parentheses at the same time. Too sad you can't fully use it in these situations.
But it's not a problem of fear of parentheses ; actually I couldn't find other cases where . and ! could be used without feeling a bit ugly (i.e. in calling functions or macros). Yes, parentheses & s-exprs are great, but I don't believe they should be the only syntax for accessing structures.
Don't worry anyway, I don't think Paul would integrate suggestions he considers weak, even if many of us asked it.
