"The grouping symbols are much harder to parse than parentheses. Parens are bigger than characters, and our brains can easily pick them out. A symbol can't be so easily found, especially when it is mixed in with other symbols."
When I use grouping symbols, I choose symbols like "-" and ":" which skirt that issue. I've considered setting a language-wide policy to use these symbols exclusively for grouping, but I haven't yet designed a language where that policy would fit in. (It would fit into Arc or Scheme, for instance, but I didn't design those. :-p )
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"you could only make the first body argument to let the first odd item in the arguments to let that has parens, and not simply the first item in the arguments that has parens, but that prevents this from being working code"
The technique I use in Lathe's 'xloop is to greedily consume variable-and-anything pairs from the body. This terminates either when there's a non-variable at an odd location, or when there aren't enough elements left to make a pair, whichever comes first.
On a more extreme note, I'd kinda like to see most binding happen in 'do. If a variable-and-anything pair appears in a (do ...) form, that binding should hold for the remainder of the form. I implement this in Lathe as 'lets.
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"Implicit parens? That's insane!"
I don't get it either. :) But if the idea is to have a "there are only a few ways to write it"[1] approach to syntax, that would explain both the implicit paren enforcement and the mandatory four-space indent.
By the way, I think you might need to write your 'let example like this:
let top (+ (- b
- (expt b 2
* 4 a c)
,bottom (* 2 a
/ top bottom
