Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
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From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry Baker)
Subject: Re: Removing READ
Message-ID: <hbaker-2202951004460001@192.0.2.1>
Sender: hbaker@netcom6.netcom.com
Organization: nil
References: <dig-Scheme-7.45@mc.lcs.mit.edu> <9502160422.AA05023@clark.lcs.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 1995 18:03:13 GMT
Lines: 21

In article <9502160422.AA05023@clark.lcs.mit.edu>,
shivers@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu wrote:

>    Hey why don't we take out 'read' while we're at it? Clearly it can be
>    implemented directly in scheme. It's only a few read-chars and some table
>    lookup right? read could be a standard library function. Besides, how often
>    do you actually have to lex and parse scheme datums. I find it horrible
>    that the scheme standard requires that *every* implementation must have a
>    lexer and parser available. And what's with that string stuff, they're just
>    vectors of characters. You could just put all that string comparison stuff
>    into SLIB.
> 
> Quite right! Many programs don't need to parse s-expressions into list
               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> structure.
  ^^^^^^^^^

One look at all of the bletcherous '.xxxrc' files proves this statement
dreadfully wrong.  The world would be dramatically improved if nearly
_all_ programs parsed s-expressions for '.xxxrc' programs instead of
re-inventing the parsing/language wheel for every single init file.
