Are there any #Lisp programmers out there who use a #ScreenReader? Given how messy Lisp can be to read without proper indentation (which I imagne wouldn't translate well on a screen reader) I can't see it is being an easy language to work in without being able to see it.
I've been thinking about a way to make an editor that lets you explore a Lisp program by walking through the forms in the program in a manner similar to the way one might navigate in a MUD. Is this a crazy idea, or one with some merit?
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Laurent Cimon
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •I can imagine making a screen reader for lisp would be doable. Instead of close parenthesis it could say close defun, and instead of open parenthesis it could say open, then the function name. The rest of the language would be decently adapted.
It might still be hard to understand complex expressions though.
Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Digital Mark λ ☕️ 🕹 👽 • •Dave Tenny
in reply to Jonathan Lamothe • • •Not to discourage new ways to solve old problems, I just want to point out that your lisp journey will be much easier if you use an editor designed for the task, which includes learning a set of editor operations that function at the "form"/s-exp level.
In emacs these operations include traversal functions like `forward-sexp`, and the very useful `indent-sexp` function. They're part of basic emacs behavior, you don't even need to do change emacs configuration to enable them, and they're useful on data other than lisp source code.
Once you can easily navigate up, down, and around forms, checking to see where a form starts and ends is easy without any sensitivity to how it's indented.
Jonathan Lamothe
in reply to Dave Tenny • •