#^ and #/

[Alan Bawden <ALAN at MIT-MC>]

cc: BUG-LISPM at MIT-AI


Well, 100% MacLisp compatability is just plain impossible.  Especially
with respect to character sets.  Face it, the LispMachine character
set is NOT ASCII.  The character numbered 1 is a plain ordinary
printing character just like the one numbered 101.  To call it control-A
is confusing the issue.

I realize there are problems with dealing with the two character sets.
There are many maps from how-you-think-about-characters to actual
characters (fixnums), #^ gets you one map and #/ gets you another.
Unfortunately you want something different from both of these.  I
suggest you either give up on sharpsigns and type "1", or define a
private sharpsign macro that does what YOU want:

(set-syntax-/#-macro-char #/<whatever> #'(lambda (ignore stream) ...))

is the prefered way, but you can also do exactly the same thing you would
do in MacLisp if you wish to be compatable here.