From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: loading Emacs-Lisp into CL
Date: 1999/02/25
Message-ID: <3128925389526090@naggum.no>#1/1
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References: <m3lnhs7ivh.fsf@eho.eaglets.com> <m390dq4as2.fsf@eho.eaglets.com> <36D2BC01.708622FD@elwood.com> <djiucsec9y.fsf@planet.praeclarus.demon.co.uk>
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Organization: Naggum Software; +47 8800 8879; http://www.naggum.no
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

* aaron.crane@pobox.com (Aaron Crane)
| Modern Emacs Lisp readers have horrific kluges to recognise old-style
| backquoting; this also means that certain (admittedly obscure) usages of
| backquote will fail.

  this isn't quite true.  the new-style backquoting is returned as
  old-style function calls with funny function names.

(car (read-from-string "`(a ,b ,@c)")) => (\` (a (\, b) (\,@ c)))

  (the two values are returned as a cons.)  moreover, ` is a macro:

(symbol-function '\`) => (macro . #<lambda (arg)>)

  this macro is not very well-written and frequently gets seriously
  confused.
  
#:Erik, who has tried and given up fixing it