Re: Lisp Reader & Tools

Kludgy workaround: use a #\FUNKY-UNICODE-NOT-ANSI-SINGLE-QUOTE and a
#\FUNKY-UNICODE-NOT-ANSI-DOUBLE-QUOTE to define reader macros on.
I am sure such characters are there in UNICODE.

MA


On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 8:30 PM David McClain (as dbm at
refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:

> Turns out Richard Gabriel was hiding something in his "Worse is Better”.
> Lisp, and I suspect many other ancient languages, made use of some grand
> assumptions based on the 1-char lookahead. And they assumed that tools like
> text-editors could discern important boundaries via simple regular
> expression matching.
>
> This is not the very best that can be had, contrary to the MIT Thesis put
> forth by Gabriel. Lisp, it turns out, makes many assumptions about inputs,
> just like Forth does. It works well for properly formed inputs. But all
> bets are off otherwise.
>
> And this worked marvelously well for now near 75 years. But I have found
> its limits.
>
> I wanted to extend the reader syntax to allow for angle input formats like
> you see printed in the ephemerides, 1°23’13”.234
>
> And I can almost get away with it, except for the “ mark on the
> arc-seconds portion.
>
> Similar things happen with reader macros that inhale arbitrary chars when
> they run into things like | (vbar) and \ (backslash). The reader macros
> handle it just fine, but the text editors do not.
>
> A more modern approach would chop up the incoming text through a lexical
> analyzer into tokens. And the edits would be applied to tokens, not regex
> matches.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
> [email protected]
> http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html
>


-- 
Marco Antoniotti, Professor, Director         tel. +39 - 02 64 48 79 01
DISCo, University of Milan-Bicocca U14 2043   http://dcb.disco.unimib.it
Viale Sarca 336
I-20126 Milan (MI) ITALY

REGAINS: https://regains.disco.unimib.it/