readtable hacking

["Guy L. Steele, Jr." <GLS at MIT-MC>]

    Date:    20 Sep 1979 1743-EDT
    From:    DAVE.TOURETZKY at CMU-10A 

    I've had two requests from users for readtable hacks.  Can you tell
    me how to do the following?

    1) Make ] be both a letter and a break character.  Example: the
    character sequence AB]CD should produce three atoms: AB, ], and CD.

Make ] have "single character object" syntax.  The easiest way to do this
is to say (SETSYNTAX '/] 'SINGLE ()).

    2) Implement an Interlisp-style "super paren", e.g. make ] or escape
    insert enough right parens to close out the current s-expression.
    Alternatively, it could insert some constant number of right parens,
    providing we can make the constant big enough.

This is fairly difficult to do in the current set-up.  Super-parens
were never installed in MacLISP because you don't need them very much
if you have a good screen editor, and they are rather ugly.  Sorry.

    Thanks,  -- Dave Touretzky