[Openmcl-devel] ccl manual (was Re: trace on recursive functions)

[Brian Mastenbrook]

On 12/13/2009 7:33 PM, Ron Garret wrote:
>
> On Dec 13, 2009, at 12:30 PM, Brian Mastenbrook wrote:
>
>> I personally find editing text in S-Expressions to be incredibly
>> cumbersome. Quite a lot of my code is mixed XML/S-Expressions done with
>> a reader macro that allows me to write things like (<a href="test">
>> "Text!"), and while this works for layout in web applications I'd go mad
>> trying to read things like "This is a bit of text that has \"quotes\"
>> and \"\\"\" (backslashes) in it".
>
> Then I have good news for you too.  There is another cool new technology called Unicode, which gives you access to additional characters beyond those in the traditional ASCII repertoire.  In particular, Unicode gives you access to a number of different styles of balanced quotation marks.  Balanced quotation marks can be nested, and also allow one level of traditional unbalanced quotes to be contained, all without any escape characters.  e.g.
>
> «Balanced quotes can be «nested» and can contain "unbalanced quotation marks" without any escape characters.»

Clearly for a documentation-oriented wiki, there will be a need to use 
the standard quotation marks that Common Lisp uses. Your funny Unicode 
quotations are just constituent characters to the default reader. 
Furthermore, it's not easy to input these characters for most users.

-- 
Brian Mastenbrook
brian at mastenbrook.net
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/