Re: DIGIT-WEIGHT/DIGITP and funny input bases

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

The wrong division of labor? Who would want to write a parser
anyway? Who is going to implement a reader?

I don't think its honest to encourage users to implement
"un-lispy" syntax via a set of lisp primitives. Think of the people who
lost because they hacked the maclisp readtable, and now can't
run on the lisp machine. (e.g. CGOL). Why should we pretend to
provide general faciluties for that sort for thing when we
know that it is highly non-optimal, and brings people away
 from powerfull extensions to the language? (extensions to
the PRINTER and GRINDER and DESCRIBER through various
stucture mechanisms, and to the EVALUATOR through functions
and macros).

Now, if you give 'em something like the finite-state-machine
compiler and interpreter as a user-package, then I think
they will be winning so much they won't even remember what life
back on the farm was like. Its a sufficiently powefull
thing non-trivialy unlike anything else in the system.

-gjc