> Note that programs were usually typed on as few lines as possible, because they had to be punched to punched cards or typed in at a teletype which echoed its input on paper.
I suspect this is the real reason behind "cram all the closing parentheses together on the same line" rule.
The only rationale I've seen online is in Taylor Campbell's style guide:
> Absolutely do not place closing brackets on their own lines.
> ...
> Rationale: The parentheses grow lonely if their closing brackets are all kept separated and segregated.
Yeah, right.
Anybody know anything about how this rule came to be?
not really. it's just pop all of the stack and return to depth 0. you can still detect imbalanced parens, but i'm not sure how it affects the provenance question of where a missing one would point out in errors.
I suspect this is the real reason behind "cram all the closing parentheses together on the same line" rule.
The only rationale I've seen online is in Taylor Campbell's style guide:
> Absolutely do not place closing brackets on their own lines.
> ...
> Rationale: The parentheses grow lonely if their closing brackets are all kept separated and segregated.
Yeah, right.
Anybody know anything about how this rule came to be?
https://www.norvig.com/lispy.html
LISPy things you can do in 64K bytes of core (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44490099 - July 2025 (4 comments)