Randall R Schulz wrote: > On Monday 22 December 2008 07:58, Michael Wood wrote: > >> ... >> >> This seems to be a lot simpler if you use keywords instead of >> ?something: >> > > The tradition of using a leading question mark to designate a (logical) > variable is pretty widespread, and many practitioners from the realms > of automated reasoning and related ares are inured to it. You'll find > it in many texts on ATP and related topics. (The Common Logic > specification abandoned it, and along with that naming convention went > the possibility of writing formulas with free variables. Many of us > still use the question marks even though they're not required.) Prolog > does something similar: An initial capital letter makes a name a > variable. Prover9 (and its forebear Otter) deems a name to be that of a > variable when its first letter is 'x' through 'z' (lower-case only). It > can be switched to the Prolog convention, as well. Cyc names are > signified by an initial #$ (you can guess why, given its Lisp heritage) > and its variables by the question mark > > In any event, the approach of assigning syntactic categories based on > the first character is widespread. Furthermore, many of the systems > that do so are written in (some dialect of) Lisp, and hence already > support and use keywords designated by initial colons (typically to > specify various options). I believe the development of such systems was > a big motivation for programmable readers in Common Lisp and its > ancestors. > > > I bring up all this history, which may seem irrelevant to many, because > I continue to believe that Clojure would benefit from read-table > control. > > Hi Randall,
How do you envision read-table control to be useful in the context of this particular problem - perhaps to redefine tokens beginning with '?' as keywords? And is read-table control the same thing as reader macros? Best Regards, Adam. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
