Alpheus Madsen: > I'm still kindof neutral on whether or not there should be a non-whitespace > character that acts as a whitespace character.
Fair enough. I was skeptical at first, but I'm more of a fan after trying it out. I'm not a fan of "." as that character any more, because it has too many other established uses, but the idea makes sense to me. > Even so, I'm also inclined to think that, since we're talking about Lisp, > there's always a chance that somewhere, someone has written a function or > macro that begins with a given character, *especially* if that character is > ASCII and isn't considered a special character by Lisp. > ... historically, ASCII has been the limit of what can be used in a computer > language I think we need to stay with ASCII; there are still too many problems with other chars. >thus, regardless the character, we would have to be prepared to provide an >escape mechanism for it, if we wanted to use it as initial whitespace. Absolutely. We have an escape mechanism in place: "(. expr)". So you could say: (. !!) x y > I'm sure we'd be able to find something in the Unicode Astral Planes that > would work nicely...at least, until someone wants to write a program in > Cuniform, and we just happened to co-opt one of the most useful characters > for starting things in ancient Hittite! :-) :-). --- David A. Wheeler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Readable-discuss mailing list Readable-discuss@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/readable-discuss
