Subject: Re: Scheme advocacy: scheme vs. perl
From: rpw3@rigden.engr.sgi.com (Rob Warnock)
Date: 19 Dec 2001 01:47:01 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Message-ID: <9voril$1c29e$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>
Anton van Straaten <anton@appsolutions.com> wrote:
+---------------
| >Or hack the reader for your favorite Scheme implementation.  Forget
| >about the implicit ] at the beginning of a file, and you won't even have
| >to start your file with [.
| 
| Yes.  I'd have to use a different character, though, since the
| implementation I most commonly use is PLT, which has already claimed "[]"
| and "{}" as aliases for parentheses.
+---------------

Uh... It's certainly easy enough to turn that off, if you like.
See the MzScheme parameters "read-square-bracket-as-paren" and
"read-curly-brace-as-paren":

    <URL:http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/doc/mzscheme/node151.htm>
    <URL:http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/doc/mzscheme/node102.htm>

And by providing a customized reader:

    <URL:http://www.cs.rice.edu/CS/PLT/packages/doc/mzscheme/node125.htm>

that peeks one character ahead of the standard reader (and calls it
if the character isn't one you want to handle), I see no reason you
couldn't direct implement (say) BRL syntax in PLT Scheme.


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 30-3-510		<rpw3@sgi.com>
SGI Network Engineering		<http://www.meer.net/~rpw3/>
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy.		Phone: 650-933-1673
Mountain View, CA  94043	PP-ASEL-IA

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