[kazinator]

Although I'm with you on the issue of some Lisp-1 people being parochial, we can argue that "como como como" is an example of something bad that we don't necessarily want in a programming language. Not everything natural, in natural language, is good in a computer language. Never mind that a word can be a noun and verb in different ways: in natural languages, even if the word has the same role, like noun, it can have different "bindings" at the same time in that same space due to homonyms. Do you want the same symbol to have several completely unrelated global bindings in the same space, the dispatch being resolved based on semantic context (perhaps not even known until run-time)? Ouch.

Simply the fact that you have exactly two namespaces, in each of which there can only be exactly one binding for a symbol at a given lexical level, is different from natural languages.

I'm convinced that Lisp-2 and Lisp-1 have merit, and made a Lisp dialect that offers both, in a reasonable way that manages to be relatively clean.

An ideal Lisp dialect supports the reasonable request of him or her who wants (list list) to Just Work, and it supports that programmer also who has a function-valued variable f and just wants (f x y) to work. That ideal, if taken too literally, is contradictory, but an acceptable compromise is to have [f x y] work, where [] changes the evaluation of atomic forms that are bindable symbols to Lisp-1 style (utterly, with deep support from the macro-expander and evaluation semantics).

[netsettler]

I am totally comfortable with funcall. It is my preference, not something I bargain down to. I don't have a need to have (f x y) "just work". You needn't agree. I acknowledge differing tastes here. But you need to, as well. It is not proper to speak as if we obviously have the same goals. We do not. It is not that we have the same goal and are differing on tactics. We have actually different goals. That is important to see or else you cannot wrap your head around why the issue played out as it did.

As you say, notational games can be played. And there are other approaches. Just because people have different goals doesn't mean that's the end of discussion. But an honest discussion must recognize the legitimate desires of both sides without disparaging one side. Getting inside another's head is important.

I don't pass functional arguments a lot. CL programmers often don't. Where Scheme would pass functions, CL often uses keyword arguments. In sort, for example, we customize behavior not by passing some function but by passing a list of keywords. There are places we pass functions, but it is not our ordinary business. So calling it out, by doing (funcall list...) rather than just (list...) gives a signal that something unusual is happening. If you plan for this not to be unusual, you will go a different way. But we do not all aspire to pass functions at every point. I like having it for certain purposes, but doing things in other ways as well.

For another take on a middle ground than the character syntax you describe, see my http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Half-Baked/spiel/index.html

[netsettler]

> Do you want the same symbol to have several completely unrelated global bindings in the same space

Absolutely. Yes.

[kazinator]

Are you sure? Global, in the same space? As in X having three different bindings as (say) a variable, at the same environmental level ("top-level")?