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From: tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw)
Subject: Re: Bias in X3J13? (long and possibly boring)
In-Reply-To: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk's message of Mon, 24 Oct 1994 19:15:51 GMT
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Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 18:28:48 GMT
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* Jeff Dalton wrote:
> (Simon Brooke) writes:

>> Similarly, a comment system which effectively prevents in-core working
>> *must* have been deliberately provocative. So many other potential
>> solutions would have allowed both in-core and file-based development
>> styles to co-exist.  This one did not. 

> I think this is completely off the wall!  I don't believe it prevents
> in-core working, but even if it does I don't believe this claim of
> deliberate provocation.  Can it not be nailed once and for all?

I recently wrote (for another purpose: pretty printing lisp forms into
HTML files) some read macros that make READ preserve comments: this
took an hour or so.  It's a very small piece of code to take such a
structure and strip the comments out and eval/compile the result (I
didn't do this because I didn't need it).  It's another (I hope, see
another post of mine) small piece of code to prettyprint these forms
back into a file with comments preserved.  I think that this, and a
structure editor (and writing a usable structure editor must *dwarf*
the comment-preserving problems), is enough for in-core editing in CL.
Am I misunderstanding something here?

--tim
