In article <······················@theta.medizin.uni-ulm.de>,
kp gores <·····@sip.medizin.uni-ulm.de> wrote:
>how do ic hange the read-table to read in english text with the read function?
>sentences like "Bob, who said (:-)))' " shoud be accepted.
>
>as far as i know, i can change the syntax of eg "," with
>set-syntax-from-char to be the same as #\a, that is a constituient and not
>a terminating macro.
>is that all i need to do???
That may do some of what you want, but not everything is specified in the
readtable. For instance, both digits and letters are consituents, but the
parser decides whether something is a symbol or number by looking at the
contents of the token after read it all in.
In general, the Lisp reader is not designed to be a general purpose
parser. The readtable allows you to make minor adjustments to the input
syntax.
--
Barry Margolin, ······@bbnplanet.com
GTE Internetworking, Powered by BBN, Cambridge, MA
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