Editor-independent advice for working with Lisp

As an emacs user, one of the biggest contributors (other than SLIME method list prompts and the like) to my appreciation for Lisp is Paredit[1]. If you ever find yourself frustrated with counting parentheses, this is the thing for you. Essentially, it only adds delimiters in pairs - so you never delete closing parenthese, and provides functions for (| indicates cursor location)-

1. 'slurp' the token on either side of a list

(|a b c) d -> (|a b c d)

a (|b c d) -> (a |b c d)

2. 'barf' elements from either side of list

(a |b c d) -> (a b c) d

(a |b c d) -> a (b c d)

3. 'drill down' into nearest list

(|a b c (d e f)) -> (a b c (|d e f))

4. 'break out' of current list

(a b c (d e |f)) -> (a b c |(d e f))

5. And more, like 'jump across next list', 'delete next list', etc.

Using any of these commands re-indents the code. It is the best method I have ever encountered in any language environment for doing 'code surgery' like placing existing code inside conditionals. I even use it for C (although it is not nearly as smart about C/C++ as it is about Lisp, so the benefit is not as great - c'est la vie. Perhaps one day I will attempt to hack decent C/C++ support into paredit). If I ever switch to vim, attempting to port paredit will be the first thing I do, and, if I fail, no switch.

Well, that got long. Too bad the original poster on the newsgoup will never see this.

[1] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ParEdit

[2] 'slurp' and 'barf' are the "official" terminologies, by the way

The "killer feature" that Emacs brings is automatic indentation. Parenthesis matching is important, but an easy feature for non-progammable editors to support. Knowing how much whitespace belongs at the beginning of each line is harder, and pretty much requires programmability in the editor. Once you have had it, you will miss it when it is taken away. Manual indentation breaks your "flow" while composing code. This is true in C-like languages, but it is much more critical in Lisp, where there are fewer punctuation cues.

People complain about Lisp's parenthesis all the time. I almost never found them bothersome and this comes from a Lisp newbie. My editor is vim though, not emacs.

The only occasion that parens have bothered me is when I have to read code printed on paper. Some code pieces are too beautiful to resist the temptation of taking a print out for a weekend reading, comment out bits with a pencil, scribble arrows all over it etc. Its then when I have to match tiny parens printed 2-up on a piece of paper that it gets frustrating, my eyes not being what they used to be (but I still print 2-up).

A thought just occurred to me: maybe add a pretty printing mode to a2ps that draws the parens in different sizes and gray scale values. May be some day.

Can someone recommend a Lisp that will behave properly as a scripting language? By that I mean run quietly without a REPL, and honor this convention:

#!/usr/bin/lisp