Subject: Re: backslashes in strings From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/04/20 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3133637333970873@naggum.no> * Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> | reading "foo\nbar" as "foonbar" is a very quiet error. * Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com> | ASSUMING it is in fact an error at all. It HAS a semantics. You assume | that semantics is not used, and this is an error. I think you misread me here. assuming that a programmer decides to use a C-style backslashing convention and sets up his system so that it prints and is assumed to read such strings, "foo\nbar" is evidence of the intent to store a string whose fourth character when read back is a newline. given this assumption, it is a very _quiet_ error to return a string whose fourth character is the letter n. and this is precisely what will happen if the string is read back with standard syntax. the whole point of my example was to show that while the changes to the readtable that I have made (destructively) in my system will result in loud errors when parsed with standard syntax, there is, as you point out, _standard_ semantics for the choice of string syntax that produced the string. | I repeat: Languages are ecologies. thanks for repeating this for our new viewers, but I think I have that truth down pat. #:Erik