[no subject]

[Daniel L. Weinreb <dlw at MIT-AI>]

I recently warned you about the problem with open-parens at the
beginnings of lines, and how they can confuse the parsing in the editor.
MMcM points out a helpful technique for getting around this problem when
it strikes.  Often when you have an accidental open-paren at the
beginning of a line, it is inside of a string.  If so, you can preceed
it harmlessly with a slash, so that the slash will be the first
character of the line instead of the open-paren.  The slash is a quoting
character and so is ignored by the Lisp reader, and it prevents the
editor from mis-parsing the open-paren as the beginning of a top-level
definition.