CL-SYNTAX provides Reader Syntax Coventions for Common Lisp and SLIME.
The well-known problem about reader macros is that SLIME can't handle these reader macros correctly. Consider the following code:
(defpackage foo
(:use :cl))
(in-package :foo)
(cl-interpol:enable-interpol-syntax)
(list #?"Current Time: ${(get-universal-time)}")
By calling cl-interpol:enable-interpol-syntax, we can use a reader
macro #?. However, actually, when we try to evaluate the last line,
SLIME reports an error there is no such the reader macro #?. This
error might be raised on most of Common Lisp implementations except
SBCL.
The goal of CL-SYNTAX is to solve these problems. Instead of using
procedurally defined functions such like enable-something-syntax, we
introduce syntactically and declaratively defined syntax data
structure. With this data structure, we can handle *readtable*
correctly and readtables of swank server.
defsyntax name &body options
defsyntax defines a new syntax. name is a symbol and options is
a list of option.
If option formed (:macro-character char fn &optional non-terminating-p), the syntax engine will call set-macro-character
with the arguments when enabling the syntax.
If option formed (:dispatch-macro-character disp-ch sub-ch fn), the
syntax engine will call set-dispatch-macro-character with the
arguments when enabling the syntax.
Here is an example:
;; Define cl-interpol syntax
(defsyntax interpol-syntax
(:dispatch-macro-character #\# #\? #'cl-interpol::interpol-reader))
This code is equivalent to:
(defvar interpol-syntax
`((:dispatch-macro-character #\# #\? ,#'cl-interpol::interpol-reader)))
If you don't want to use defsyntax in some reasons, use this code
instead.
use-syntax syntax-to-use
use-syntax enables the syntax specified by
syntax-to-use. syntax-to-use is a symbol which is defined by
defsyntax.
Here is an example:
;; use cl-interpol syntax defined before
(use-syntax interpol-syntax)
Copyright (C) 2011-2015 Tomohiro Matsuyama <m2ym.pub@gmail.com>