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in reply to "nested parens - just say no"



Ah, its messages like this that lighten my day.

But seriously folks, one thing I may be famous or damned for was
porting CGOL (based on a theory of parsing presented in: Pratt,
Vaughan R., ``Top Down Operator Precedence,'' ACM Symposium on
Principles of Programming Languages Boston, MA; October, 1973.
Yes, 14 years ago kiddies) from maclisp to the MIT lispmachine environment,
(so I probably did the port around 1981).

In short, this makes for an efficient way to extend the lisp syntax
toward the post algol abortions of the sixities and seventies, without
going through all the grammar compilation parsing hair that compiler
books of the same era where famous for spending 99% of their discourse
alotment on.

Others have moved this port of CGOL to at least the Symbolics, LMI,
and TI systems, so although it did not seem to show up in the franz
lisp distribution (unlike most of the other "maclisp extensions" at
the time) the code has not died.

Challenge: PORT CGOL to Scheme. 
Hint: Its written in CGOL, not lisp.