From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!logbridge.uoregon.edu!news.net.uni-c.dk!uninett.no!news-feed.ifi.uio.no!ifi.uio.no!not-for-mail From: Erik Naggum Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Reading from file: without escape Backslash Date: 06 Sep 2002 22:30:05 +0000 Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 20 Message-ID: <3240340205017513@naggum.no> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Trace: maud.ifi.uio.no 1031351406 10486 129.240.64.16 (6 Sep 2002 22:30:06 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@ifi.uio.no NNTP-Posting-Date: 6 Sep 2002 22:30:06 GMT Mail-Copies-To: never User-Agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2 Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:39935 * Thomas Guettler | But isn't \n a newline? In Common Lisp, \ in strings only really escapes the " that would terminate the string, but since there is a need for an escape character, also itself. Another way to do this would be let two delimiters become one, but that was a path not taken for Common Lisp. The reason for this is that \ is useful to make certain that any character is really a constituent in the print name of symbols. Note that Common Lisp has both a single-escape and a multiple-escape mechanism with \ and |, respectively. The latter, however, also makes letters retain their case, so the decision to use | over \ also has to be balanced for aesthetics. There is nothing syntactically wrong in writing code |with| |symbols| |like| |this|, but it tends to get on people's nerves. -- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.