31 August 2010

I will be posting some notes about EMSIP

I will be posting some notes about EMSIP

For the past few days, I've been sketching an implementation of EMSIP. EMSIP is my idea of how s-expressions could be extended without losing their well-behavedness.

It is a reference implementation and it's not ready for use yet. It's really just a sketch at this point. I haven't written the testing code, and I don't consider code "really written" until it passes tests.

Ordinarily I would write the tests first and write code afterwards. The design phase would overlap with test-writing. But in this case functionality was not the only thing that interested me. I was as interested in making an elegant, minimal design as I was in functionality. So instead of writing tests first, I sketched the code and re-examined it until it seemed as elegant and minimal as was reasonably possible.

I think I largely succeeded in my goal. The code even surprised me with its elegance at a few points.

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