ergolib

That's why I'm using a library (https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib) to smooth over some of Common Lisp's rough edges. The goal of the book, what I hope will make it unique, is to teach all of the basics without having to get too hung up on the details of CL. The reason chapter 3 is taking so long is that I can't figure out a good way to get around one of those details. I want chapter 3 to be about parsing i.e. I want the reader to build READ before they build EVAL. So I want to introduce READ-FROM-STRING, and one of the things I want to be able to read from strings is characters. Unfortunately, CL uses the same character (backslash) as the reader dispatch macro character for characters (e.g. #\x) as it does for the escape character in strings. So if you type #\x you get the character x, but if you type "#\x" you get a reader error

> future Lisps are expected and encouraged That's right. There are two reasons that Common Lisp never got revised: 1. AI winter hit and the money dried up 2. Common Lisp as it stood when it was first released turned to be a very (very!) good design, in particular because it's almost infinitely flexible. You can implement almost anything within CL because you have control over every part of the code-processing process. You can modify the lexer by making new readtables, and you can change the way the AST is processed by writing macros. There is almost nothing you can't do in CL. (There are a very few things you really can't do without changing the standard, but even those are generally possible using vendor-specific extensions, or by making small tweaks to an implementation.) FWIW, here's my take on bringing CL into the 21st century:

I've been working on one: https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib The beginnings of a book using this: https://github.com/rongarret/BWFP Hello-world looks like: (require :ergolib) (defpage "/hello" "Hello world") (ensure-http-server 1234)

> You cannot. You can. Reader macros let you put whatever syntax you want on top of Sexprs. For example: Welcome to Clozure Common Lisp Version 1.10-r16479M (DarwinX8664)! ? (spark-init) #P"/Users/ron/devel/spark/ergolib/init.lisp" ? (require :parcil) ... ? (in-readtable infix) |NIL| ? infix(x=1.23+4.56) 5.79 ? sin(x*x+1) 0.03341171 ? The code for this is here: https://github.com/rongarret/ergolib