[slime-devel] Feature suggestion

[Alain Picard]

Marco Antoniotti <marcoxa at cs.nyu.edu> writes:

> Try LW for a while with this feature and you will not find yourself
> confused that much.  Remember that very many people fined
> "parentheses" confusing.

Well, I've been using LW daily for over 5 years.  I've never
heard of this function, and I'd find it insanely confusing.

Basically, this sort of thing is almost always a bad idea because:
 * newbies will have to learn the proper way at some point anyway,
   so you're in fact not helping them, you're harming them

 * an environment is created in which experienced programmers
   can get confused, i.e. you've in fact made the system more
   complex by confusing its (once clear) semantics for trivial
   syntactic gain

 * everyone should learn to just bind the `[' key to 
   insert-delimited-parenthesis anyhow.

If this ever gets into SLIME -- PLEASE make sure there's a way
to turn this off!

                --ap