From ...
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Subject: Re: Newbie Help Please: Reading into a list from a file
Date: 1999/05/03
Message-ID: <3134756936126742@naggum.no>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp

* Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
| really?  I control the meaning of whitespace by modifying the readtable
| in an application.  e.g., I have made all control characters into
| whitespace _except_ newline, which is an important delimiter in my data
| stream.  in what way does this not work?  </tongue-in-cheek>

* Vassil Nikolov <vnikolov@poboxes.com>
| (I admit that I didn't recognise the above as Kent Pitman's text, but now
| the mystery of that SGML tag has been resolved.)

  huh?  there appears to be some attribution problems here.  I hope I'm not
  morphing into Kent Pitman, or vice versa -- I like us separate.

| Perhaps it would be nice if the fact that the meaning of whitespace[2]
| depends on the current readtable and not on the standard readtable was
| made a little more explicit in the spec (indeed, *READTABLE* is listed in
| the `Affected By' section of PEEK-CHAR's description, but perhaps
| something could be mentioned either in the glossary or in Section 2.1.4.7
| (Whitespace Characters) too).

  I find this to be sufficiently basic to the language design that it would
  actually be confusing to add it in particular places -- one would have to
  wonder why it was added.

| Also, perhaps a standard function (WHITESPACEP &OPTIONAL readtable) that
| tests this attribute could be useful (I know a kludge that does this, but
| it is rather inelegant).

  your implementation may sport just such functions, or they might be
  macros or accessors inlined so strongly that they are not retained in the
  dumped image.

#:Erik