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From: simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke)
Subject: In-core comments
Message-ID: <Cy7y1x.64n@rheged.dircon.co.uk>
Organization: none. Disorganization: total.
References: <Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> <Cy1H5H.5I8@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <welch.17.001648E1@anzus.com> <Cy6wIH.8DD@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 07:56:19 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <Cy6wIH.8DD@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>In article <welch.17.001648E1@anzus.com> welch@anzus.com (Arun Welch) writes:
>>In article <Cy1H5H.5I8@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>
>>>In article <Cxxwx0.1nC@rheged.dircon.co.uk> simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk (Simon Brooke) writes:

>>>As far as I can tell, there's nothing on page 347 or anywhere else
>>>that prevents a Common Lisp system from retaining comments in various
>>>ways.
>>
>>There is, however, something on page 526: "The semicolon and all
>>characters up to and including the next newline are ignored".
>
>I knew of that and I disagree with your interpretation.
>
>Sure, if I call READ nothing can appear in the result as a product
>of the comment.  But programming environments are free to retain
>whatever information they want.  Moreover, the information can be
>made accessible through language extensions.
>

I think, here, Jeff is right, and I (and, it seems, others) had
misread. The paragraph I had originally quoted (which appears on p 347
of the aluminium book and apparently on p 526 of CLtL2) appears in the
discussion of the function READ. The discussion of the function LOAD
on p 426 (aluminium book) does *not* say that LOAD must call READ,
although I had assumed it should. Given this it must be legitiate for
LOAD to call a non standard function eg LOAD-AND-FOLD-COMMENTS which
preserves the comment structure.

I have learned something, so this flame war has not been wholly
without purpose (for me at least). I unhesitatingly withdraw this
criticism.



-- 
---------simon@rheged.dircon.co.uk
