[slime-devel] Re: Broken readtables

[Luke Gorrie]

Martin Simmons <martin at xanalys.com> writes:

> I made it use WITH-STANDARD-IO-SYNTAX originally to get all the
> standard bindings, in particular you must also bind *PACKAGE*
> because the function sets it.  There is also *READ-BASE*,
> *READ-DEFAULT-FLOAT-FORMAT* and *READ-SUPPRESS* to consider.

True, plus any other implementation-defined reader setting (I don't
know if LispWorks has any). I particularly hadn't realised that
with-standard-io-syntax was binding *package*.

I hacked it to use a `with-fairly-standard-io-syntax' macro. This does
with-standard-io-syntax but then rebinds *package* and *readtable* as
they were before executing the body. Sound reasonable?

> What binds *READTABLE* when you do M-. anyway?  It doesn't seem to be bound
> for me when DSPEC-STREAM-POSITION is reached via FIND-DEFINITIONS-FOR-EMACS.

[Just read the *readtable-alist* code for the first time.]

Nobody sets it for definition-finding. That's reasonable in swank.lisp
since it doesn't know what package the definition will be in. Perhaps
ideal would be for dspec-stream-position to set the right readtable
(from *readtable-alist*) when it sees IN-PACKAGE. I'm not sure if the
other backends can/should do this too. We'd have to move
*readtable-alist* into swank-backend.lisp.

But I suspect the main issue right now is to make sure that a
custom-hacked readtable that one installs globally as *READTABLE* will
be used by `M-.'. That's how I do my readtable'ery, at least.

P.S., Helmut, I think I was sleeping when *readtable-alist* when
in. Could you post a snippet of how it's supposed to be used?

Cheers,
Luke