Fixing Lisp Syntax

Question

Being a newbie to Lisp I'm wondering if the Lisp syntax could be "fixed"?

Some people say the syntax in Lisp is one of its biggest strengths. I don't quite understand this.

Isn't it possible to replace "obvious" parentheses with a combination of white spaces, new lines and indenting? Just like in Python?

It looks to me like parentheses are the most used characters in Lisp code. I'm wondering if that's true - but if it is, isn't this a suggestion, that there is some redundancy in the syntax?

Is there some simple answer to the question - why so many parentheses?

For example:

(defun factorial (x)
    (if (= x 0)
        1
        (* x 
           (factorial (- x 1)))))

Why not:

defun factorial (x)
  if (= x 0)
    1
    * x
      factorial
        - x 1

e.g. close parentheses at the end of line, and always open them on new lines. Only the 1 would be ambiguous - is it 1 or (1) - but we could introduce an exception - single tokens are not "listified".

Could this work?

Edit:

Thank you all! I see now there are some links at the lispin site.

Answer 1

You'll change your mind once you write a couple of macros.

Answer 2

It's been done lots of times (a < twenty line preprocessor will do wonders). But there is also an advantage to having them explicit. It drives home the parallelism between code and data, and in a way leads you out of the sort of thinking that makes you find them annoying.

You could (for an analogous example) take an object oriented language and remove all the syntactic grouping of methods into classes (so they became, in effect, overloaded functions). This would let you look at it more as you would a straight imperative language, but something would be lost as well.

When you look at lisp you're supposed to think "Everything is a list. Ommm"

(Well, Ok, the "Ommm" is optional).