Re: Lisp Reader & Tools

Why are you guys so resistant to making the computer help the user, and not the other way around?

At this point, I think Common Lisp is the most versatile system I have ever used. 

While it is true that you can do literally anything in Forth, given that you can drop immediately into the machine code Assembler from the keyboard, you also have to do literally everything yourself. That puts a huge burden on the programmer, and so mostly we just do the bare minimum to get by.

Common Lisp does a huge amount of work with its GC, CLOS, Compiler, basic language primitives oriented toward collections of objects, etc. And now I can craft the data entry portion of the language to accommodate me much better than an initial system does, at the cost of allowing parentheses to delimit tokens in addition to whitespace. A reasonable compromise.

As far as I can tell, everything I have done to extend the input syntax for numbers is completely portable to LW and SBCL, and it does not interfere with the normal operation assumed by all the Quicklisp packages.

How can anything done in Lisp to make it a better system for human users be a bad thing? I now regret taking so long to tune the system to my needs.

————————

With regard to the inability of mere regular expressions guiding the text editor, here is a snippet of code that needs those accessory comments mentioned previously. Note the funny comment on the first line “— |# |#”. That was needed so that the Editor wouldn’t get confused by all the vertical nbars in the code on the left...

(	   
: skipper     
     case { "#|"      string= } { [compile] #|  }  -- |# |#
          { ";;"      string= } { [compile] ;;  }
          { ";;;"     string= } { [compile] ;;; }
          { "--"      string= } { [compile] --  }
          { "("       string= } { [compile] (   }
          { "#+IF"    string= } { skip-to-fi    }
          { "#-IF"    string= } { skip-to-fi    }
          { "\""      string= } { skip-quote    }
          { ".\""     string= } { skip-quote    }
          { "error\"" string= } { skip-quote    }
      esac ;


> On May 28, 2026, at 03:21, Tim Bradshaw (as tfb at cley dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> On 27 May 2026, at 22:31, David McClain <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> To use #N/xx…/ means I have to pre-edit the printout before submitting to Lisp.
> 
> Let me tell you the parable of the plough as it was once related to me by a wandering preacher.
> 
> A wandering preacher came upon a farmer.  The land was fertile, but the farmer was thin and his family was thin.
> 
> "Why are you so thin?" the preacher asked "Surely the land here is rich, you, your family and your horses should eat well."
> 
> "It's my plough." the farmer said "it's a very bad plough: it's enormously heavy, it's really blunt, it doesn't have proper attachments for the horses to pull it and anyway it's too heavy for them.  Also the horses don't like to work.  And they bite, you wouldn't believe how they bite.  The other day they ate two of my children!"
> 
> The preacher asked the farmer to be allowed to look in the barn.  The farmer agreed and the preacher went to look.  A little later she came back.  She was trying not to laugh.
> 
> "Farmer, I have to tell you something." the preacher said "That isn't a plough: it's an electron microscope.  And your horses are not horses: they are tigers.  You should go to the blacksmith and buy a plough: they will give you some money off in exchange for the electron microscope I am sure.  And I will take your tigers as they will defend me at night, and you may have my two fine gypsy cobs."
> 
> But the farmer said "No, no, I like my horses and my plough, even if I am starving and my horses are eating my family."
> 
> The preacher shrugged and went on her way.  A month later she returned, buried the remains of the farmer and his family, freed the pair of tigers and exchanged the electron microscope for a copious supply of tiger food.
> 
> ---
> 
> The plough you need here is probably called 'sed', or perhaps 'perl'.
> 
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