S-expression

S-expression is a historical meta language created in 1960. In computing, s-expressions, sexprs or sexps (for "symbolic expression") are a notation for nested list (tree-structured) data, invented for and popularized by the programming language Lisp, which uses them for source code as well as data. In the usual parenthesized syntax of Lisp, an s-expression is classically defined as an atom, or an expression of the form (x . y) where x and y are s-expressions. Read more on Wikipedia...

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• S-expression ranks in the top 50% of languages
• the S-expression wikipedia page
• S-expression first appeared in 1960
• See also: lisp, scheme, c, common-lisp, xml, python, islisp, rfc
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Example code from Wikipedia:

def parse_sexp(string):
    """
    >>> parse_sexp("(+ 5 (+ 3 5))")
    [['+', '5', ['+', '3', '5']]]
    
    """
    sexp = [[]]
    word = ''
    in_str = False
    for char in string:
        if char is '(' and not in_str:
            sexp.append([])
        elif char is ')' and not in_str:
            if word:
                sexp[-1].append(word)
                word = ''
            temp = sexp.pop()
            sexp[-1].append(temp)
        elif char in (' ', '\n', '\t') and not in_str:
            if word:
                sexp[-1].append(word)
                word = ''
        elif char is '\"':
            in_str = not in_str
        else:
            word += char
    return sexp[0]

Last updated July 22nd, 2019