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Subject: Re: Newbie Help Please: Reading into a list from a file
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/05/02
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3134619038404535@naggum.no>

* Kent M Pitman <pitman@world.std.com>
| The above text is either mine or vey like something I said.  It means you
| can't change the meaning of whitespace independent of what READ wants.

  that's ok, because I use this _with_ READ, to read ordinary Common Lisp
  forms, except that a bunch of features have been disabled, whitespacitude
  has been relaxed, and the newline is a terminating macro character.

  building my own reader may have been as much work, but starting to build
  my own reader would have been a lot more work, and it would have been a
  lot of duplicative effort, anyway.  as I have gained experience from
  usage, I have come to exclude various stuff from that readtable, but I
  would still do it the same way all over again, because I really don't
  have the time to write the low-level stuff in a reader.  the C complement
  to my protocol is mostly reader-related, and all it does is attach a type
  character to the front of a string, and all objects are represented as
  strings, re-parsed upon demand.  call it a cop-out, but there's a lot of
  hairy stuff that READ does that is too detailed and low-level to work out
  anew, without effectively designing your own syntax, and _that's_ just
  plain evil.

| But, I guess as a function of my advancing age, and the inevitable
| spoilsport-like attitude that eventually takes over us oldsters making us
| no fun to talk to any more, I've come a bit more to the conclusion that
| some things that are POSSIBLE are nevertheless still not the best way to
| do things.

  oh, stop it!  we youngsters like you just the way you are, Kent.

#:Erik