[Openmcl-devel] Error on macro character after sharpsign colon

[Ron Garret]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 2:17 PM, Terje Norderhaug wrote:

> On Jan 26, 2010, at 1:58 PM, Ron Garret wrote:
>> This has nothing to do with uninterned symbols.
> 
> Don't let the particular situation lead you astray: This does have to  
> do with reading of uninterned symbols. Rather than loading a third  
> party module, I could just as well have written the uninterned symbol  
> "#:<"  in my own code and expected it to be read without error, just  
> as "<" would be read as a symbol.

If tokens were first-class entities that might be a reasonable expectation, but they aren't.  If you think through the process in detail you will see that having "<" be read as a (possibly interned) symbol by a user-defined reader macro function is fundamentally incompatible with "#:<" being read as an uninterned symbol.

rg