[Openmcl-devel] Using readtables for only one library

[Ron Garret]

On May 10, 2010, at 10:44 AM, Dan Weinreb wrote:

> James Anderson kindly pointed me to Edi Weitz's cl-interpol, which
> does this.  http://www.weitz.de/cl-interpol/
> 
> It's not the only thing I was thinking of doing with
> the readtable.  Ruby also lets you type in strings
> with single-quotes (which does not do interpolation).
> I was thinking of allowing that. 
> (If you want to quote something, just use backquote.)

This is one of my pet reader macros:

(defun make-string-reader (c1 c2)
  (set-macro-character
   c1
   (lambda (stream c)
     (declare (ignore c))
     (with-output-to-string (s)
       (loop for c = (read-char stream)
         with cnt = 1
         if (eql c c1) do (incf cnt)
         else if (eql c c2) do (decf cnt)
         until (and (eql c c2) (eql cnt 0))
         do (princ c s))
      s))
   t))

(make-string-reader #\« #\»)
(make-string-reader #\“ #\”)

This lets you use balanced quotes for strings, which lets you write nested strings without having to use backslash escapes.  We have unicode.  We might as well use it.

rg