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"you never try to type foo - bar"

Unless you have a function called "foo", and you want to pass it the subtraction function as it's first parameter and the value "bar" as its second. In which case (foo - bar) is perfectly valid, reasonable, and completely different from (foo-bar).

Even though Lisp is not an infix language, foo-bar does mean something different to the parser than foo - bar because of whitespace.



I know that, but it’s highly incidental to my point, as I’m sure you’re aware. It’s obviously true that (foo - bar) is legal, as is (foo-bar), as is (foo - bar + bash), as is (foo-bar + bash) and so on, but they’re still much less likely to be mistaken for foo-bar in an infix language.

I’m sure you knew perfectly well that I meant you never type foo - bar meaning foo subtract bar :-)




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