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by timonoko
1314 days ago
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Ok. I understood my error in about 5.3 second but let it stay, because it was funny, and would trigger somebody to generate a wall-chart of explanations. Anyways already in 1982 I was diabolically opposed to this kind of shit. Read and Print should be as simple as possible and always one-to-one. When you print something to disk, that is what you get when reading, no additional adjustment needed. If you want reading macros, for example, you make your own Read. Better Read could even be in standard package "Additional-macros-for-common-lisp". |
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It makes little sense to reimplement (and maintain over time) the whole Read if you only care about changing some small aspect of it. Instead, you can consider standard Read mechanism from CL to be extensible - reader macros are plugins/hooks/customization points/whatever you want to call it. You can maintain 1:1 Read/Print compatibility easily by defining/overriding a matching printer method, which is the Print side plugin/hook/customization point/whatever.
The only thing that could be simpler than this would be some magic that lets you automatically derive a read macro and a printing method from a simple declaration, but for that you'd have to sacrifice Turing completeness.
In my experience, reader macros are just freaking people out for unconscious and irrational reasons. I can tell because they still freak me out a little, even though I'm conceptually fine with them.