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Comment by thiht | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right, I didn't know the difference between "a" and "(a)", sorry.

My point was more about the two extra parentheses for each && or ||. Imagine converting

   if (a && b && c && d || e)

to a LISP.

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    if (a && b && c && d || e) {
      doSomething();
    }

becomes

    (if (or (and a b c d) e)
      (doSomething))

It's just a little more explicit because operator associativity and precedence aren't worked out for you. (For better or for worse.)

EDIT: I think you were imagining something like this:

    (if (or (and a (and b (and c (and d)))) e)
      (doSomething))

..which is definitely not the art.

Adding to this, in a real situation those variables are probably not going to be nice single letter variables. With longer names the Lisp syntax with unambiguous structure/order of precedence becomes much nicer.

  (if (or (and foobar
               (some-predicate-p quux)
               (= qwerty 432))
          (a-long-function-call-with-two-args bar ytr))
      ...)

Compared to something like:

  if (foobar &&
      somePredicate(quux) &&
      (qwerty == 432) ||
      aLongFunctionCallWithTwoArgs(bar, ytr)) {
      ...
  }

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