I understand, but those are hardly two conflicting things, are they ?
Julia does seem to use some sort of Scheme in their implementation, wouldn't it make sense to allow S-expressions in the language (or is it allowed ?) ? Or maybe, the designers/implementors felt that it wasn't necessary ?
In a strict sense they are, I think: A[1, 2:6] could writtenas an S-expression---something like (getindex A 1 (range 2 6)), maybe, but it is not in itself an S-expression. (I think: I'm relying on Wikipedia for the precise definition of "S-expression".)
Your broader point stands, though: I can't see any reason that one couldn't have S-expressions + syntactic sugar (not that I know anything at all about designing programming languages).
My guess is that it's a sociological thing? As scott_s pointed out, people expect something Matlab-like. From http://julialang.org/ : "Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. "
The parser and AST lowering is written in scheme. I can't really comment on all the design decisions involved, since I joined the project at a later stage, but personally I'm rather happy with it and I think especially people new to programming have an easier time with a syntax like this than with S-expressions.
Comments
I understand, but those are hardly two conflicting things, are they ?
Julia does seem to use some sort of Scheme in their implementation, wouldn't it make sense to allow S-expressions in the language (or is it allowed ?) ? Or maybe, the designers/implementors felt that it wasn't necessary ?
In a strict sense they are, I think: A[1, 2:6] could writtenas an S-expression---something like (getindex A 1 (range 2 6)), maybe, but it is not in itself an S-expression. (I think: I'm relying on Wikipedia for the precise definition of "S-expression".)
Your broader point stands, though: I can't see any reason that one couldn't have S-expressions + syntactic sugar (not that I know anything at all about designing programming languages).
My guess is that it's a sociological thing? As scott_s pointed out, people expect something Matlab-like. From http://julialang.org/ : "Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. "
The parser and AST lowering is written in scheme. I can't really comment on all the design decisions involved, since I joined the project at a later stage, but personally I'm rather happy with it and I think especially people new to programming have an easier time with a syntax like this than with S-expressions.
Yes, they are. Nobody (ie. small amounts of somebody) likes Lispy syntax, except Lisp programmers (and those are not that many nowadays anyway).
Julia wanted a chance to be a succesful scientific language.