Re: Read-line

[reti@cambridge.apple.com (Kalman Reti)]

At 10:36 AM 2/25/94 +0100, Benoit Habert wrote:
>I have troubles with read-line function in MCL.
>
>Read-line is supposed to "read in a line of text terminated by a newline.
>It returns the line as a character string" [Steele 90].
>As a matter of fact, in MCL, read-line expects a non-empty line, and then
>returns it as a string. If you just press the RETURN key, the top-level
>waits until it receives a non-empty line.

This isn't a problem with READ-LINE, it is a feature of (problem with?) the
lisp listener.  In listener windows, the normal meaning of the RETURN character
has been usurped; what it means there is to copy the expression the cursor
is currently in to the end of the buffer (if not already there) and to attempt
to execute it (if it is a complete lisp form).   You can see that READ-LINE
works as expected by typing c-q Return (to quote the return character an
remove its special meaning in the Lisp listener).

Do you really need to use the READ-LINE function in a listener?  If so, I can
probably provide a kludge patch...


>
>Is there a means in MCL to fix the problem ? I want a way to return either
>a non-empty string or the empty string delimited by the RETURN key.
>
>Thanks in advance
>
>Benoit Habert