Reading the Readtable

[Alan Bawden <ALAN at MIT-MC>]

    Date: 8 January 1982 16:52-EST
    From: Henry Lieberman <Henry at MIT-AI>

    How do you ask the readtable what the syntax of a particular
    character is? [Like MacLisp's  (STATUS SYNTAX ...)]
    No function to do this is documented in the Blue manual.
    Ideally, it would returns keywords as acceptable to 
    SET-SYNTAX-FROM-DESCRIPTION.

There is no object that I could return to you in that situation that
would be any more usefull than the original character was.  Where in
MacLisp you would do:

(setsyntax #/$ (status syntax #/:) nil)

on the LispMachine can be accomplished by doing:

(set-syntax-from-char #/$ #/:)

I agree that having a symbolic name for a usefull syntax is a good
idea, but I cannot possibly think up names for all of them.  Remember
that A is different from E is different from S etc.  Do you have a
specific syntax that you think deserves a name?  What is your
application?  Perhaps you can be accommodated in some other way?