Re: DIGIT-WEIGHT/DIGITP and funny input bases

[Robert W. Kerns <RWK at MIT-MC>]

Hey, I wasn't saying that we want to encourage people to hack funny input bases
and weird Pratt-like syntaxes.  Rather, considering funny input bases led me to
consider the choice of functions, and how they are used.  If you're not doing
some parser-like activity, why are you checking if something is a digit?  It
may be a totally trivial parse, like gobbling line numbers off the beginning of
a line of some data file, or parsing the output of some MACSYMA program.  All
the examples I've seen people come up with for use of DIGITP have been imbedded
in the context of 'OK, now I've got this digit, now I incrementally interpret
it as a number'.