[ART@THINK-AQUINAS.ARPA: Another

[Kent M Pitman <KMP@SCRC-STONY-BROOK.ARPA>]

    Date: Tue, 18 Mar 1986  17:56 EST
    From: "Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>

	I am a bit leery of #+ignore or
	#+++ignore, because some turkey could make IGNORE or ++IGNORE be a feature
	after all and ruin everything; but #+(or) strikes me as an acceptable
	idiom (but perhaps #-(and) is better to emphasize its negative nature).

    Feh!  This is by far the ugliest and most confusing construct ever
    proposed for Common Lisp (not counting Format, of course).  I don't
    think that this problem needs to be solved, but if it does I find #;
    infinitely preferable, even though it wastes a perfectly good macro
    character.

As a pragmatic issue, some text editors (particularly Emacs) will have trouble
with "#;" because they will think the ";" means comment to end of line and may
not recognize the "#;" as a cluster. While such programs would obviously be in
error, they might not get fixed very quickly and users might suffer as a 
consequence. For this reason, I suggest that "#;" be held in reserve and not
used for anything that does not read just a single line of text.

Similar motivation was likely used when we made #|...|# be matchfix -- to 
avoid confusion with the fact that |...| by itself is matchfix.

-kmp