> come with the baggage of foreign looking syntax
Maybe they're right about the syntax too though? :)
Maybe they're right about the syntax too though? :)
(< lower-bound x-coordinate upper-bound)
lower_bound < x_coordinate < upper_bound
lower_bound <= x_coordinate < upper_bound
In Python this is a magical special case, but in Icon/Unicon it falls out somewhat naturally from the language semantics; comparisons don't return Boolean values, but rather fail (returning no value) or succeed (returning a usually unused value which is chosen to be, IIRC, the right-hand operand).
And in SQL you have
`x-coordinate` between `lower-bound` - 1 and `upper-bound` + 1
If you have a course where one day you're supposed to do Haskell and another Erlang, and another LISP, and another Prolog, and there's only one exercise in each language, then you're obviously going to have to waste a lot of time on syntax, but that's never a situation you encounter while actually programming.
I write way more algol-derived language code than ML, yet piped operations being an option over either constant dot operators where every function returns the answer or itself depending on the context or inside out code is beautiful in a way that I've never felt about my C#/C++/etc code. And even Lisp can do that style with arrow macros that exist in at least CL and Clojure (dunno about Racket/other schemes).