Settting readmacro characters

[JONL at MIT-MC (Jon L White)]

    Date:    28 May 1979 0253-EDT
    From:    DAVE.TOURETZKY at CMU-10A 
    Subject: COMPLR loses on sstatus splicing macro
    
    I have a little function that changes and restores the readmacro
    property associated with ";".  It restores it by doing
      (sstatus macro 59 oldsemi splicing)
    which is a perfectly legal call.  COMPLR complains that SPLICING was not
    declared special.

    ... <barfage> ...

The accepted winning way to set readmacros is
   (SETSYNTAX 59. 'SPLICING oldsemi)
there would be no complaint from complr about that one.  The
misleading thing is that there is no function GETSYNTAX.