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

[Terje Norderhaug]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 2:59 PM, Ron Garret wrote:
> 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.


No, there is no "fundamental incompatibility". Ceci n'est pas une  
pipe. Let's not confuse the textual representation with the object -  
ironically of type "symbol"... ;-)

-- Terje Norderhaug
   terje at in-progress.com