Re: Lisp Reader & Tools

On 27 May 2026, at 19:30, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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.

That misses the point of the Gabriel paper.  The CL reader is designed for CL or for languages very like CL.  Nobody (despite some slightly unfortunate wording in the spec) meant it to be some completely general-purpose thing.  You might argue that this is the 'worse' bit of 'worse is better' but it's not: that's 'doesn't even do the hard parts of what it's meant to do properly because they were hard'.  The CL reader is *entirely adequate* for reading CL: a text editor which crashes on long lines is not an adequate text editor at all.

--tim

_______________________________________________
Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
[email protected]
http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html