Re: Slash: confusing the issue

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

(1) All modern ASCII terminals have backslashes.  Multics has changed
since you left; it now uses modern ASCII terminals.  The 2741s and such
are all gone.  Multics uses backslashes regularly.

(2) It doesn't matter whether we do or don't implement rational numbers,
or how we do it.  This is a red herring.  We can decide it later.  The
important thing is that we are gobbling a perfectly good character,
slash, that better things can be done with.  Because of issues such as
you have raised, the Lisp Machine has not yet implemented rationals, and
we certainly aren't going to rush out and put them in just because a new
character got freed up in the readtable.

(3) Howard, it should not be necessary to have a switch to revert / to run old
code, since all old code calls "//", which will retain its old meaning.  (I
guess you DO have to recompile things in the new readtable.)