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Minor changes to proposed reader syntax
- To: COMMON-LISP at SU-AI
- Subject: Minor changes to proposed reader syntax
- From: David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC>
- Date: Sun, 19 Sep 1982 22:47:00 -0000
- Cc: bsg at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC, acw at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC, jek at SCRC-TENEX at MIT-MC
- In-reply-to: The message of 19 Sep 82 03:33-EDT from Kent M.Pitman <KMP at MIT-MC>, The message of 14 Sep 82 01:05-EDT from David A. Moon <Moon at SCRC-TENEX>, The message of 14 Sep 82 09:25-EDT from Bernard S Greenberg <BSG at SCRC-TENEX>, The message of 13 Sep 82 19:13-EDT from Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at SCRC-TENEX>, The message of 13 Sep 82 18:15-EDT from Allan C. Wechsler <ACW at SCRC-TENEX>
I agree with KMP that bit vectors should not use #", even though I think
his proposed alternate use for #" is grotesque and definitely should not
be adopted. #* would be fine for bit-vectors. It should terminate on any
token-separator; finding an undelimited constituent character that is not
a valid digit should be an error.
Some of the reasons why I don't like the #" proposal:
- it only deals with carriage returns, not with any other special characters
you might want to insert into a string. You cannot access FORMAT's ~C operator
since you cannot supply any FORMAT arguments.
- it uses up the ~ character in a way that may not be obvious.
- it's mere syntatic sugar for what you can do easily enough with #. anyway.
I'm also surprised that KMP, who in an earlier message advocated eliminating
syntax that disappears on read-in (so that he doesn't have to write a special
reader for his programmer's-assistant system), is advocating this. Oh well,
I'm not always consistent either.