From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: readable syntax for control characters in strings
Date: 1996/10/31
Message-ID: <3055740448244280@naggum.no>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 193468311
sender: erik@arcana.naggum.no
references: <3055584571840173@naggum.no> <558q80$osg@tools.bbnplanet.com>
organization: Naggum Software; +47 2295 0313; http://www.naggum.no
newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp


* Barry Margolin <barmar@tools.bbnplanet.com>
| No.

thanks.

given that a syntax familiar to Emacs Lisp (and C) users is unavailable,
how would one accomplish the same goal: to embed a (named) control
character in a literal string in source code that is likely to travel
across all sorts of information-losing channels?

for an arbitrary character, either of the following forms produce the
desired result, but I find them clumsy.  do others do something else?

    #.(format nil "foo~Cbar" #\Newline)
    #.(concatenate 'string "foo" '(#\Newline) "bar")

(incidentally, my actual problem case involves lots of escape sequences for
a form printer now written in Emacs Lisp with the `cl' package.  it is
trivially portable to Common Lisp except for the string literals.)

I feel I must have overlooked something or think in the wrong terms.

#\Erik
-- 
Those who do not know Lisp are doomed to reimplement it.