Syntax control code

Robert Goldman rpgoldman at sift.info
Sat Jan 6 00:53:45 UTC 2018


I just pushed an edit of syntax-control.md in which I try to capture the 
terminology.

Status: several Allegro failures break for me on test-syntax-control.  
Results from Linux:

build/results/allegro8_64-test.text
build/results/allegro8_64_s-test.text
build/results/allegromodern8_64-test.text
build/results/allegromodern8_64_s-test.text
build/results/allegromodern_64-test.text
build/results/allegromodern_64_s-test.text

These failures seem to be due to NAMED-READTABLES not working properly 
on these platforms, rather than on anything ASDF itself does.

Concern:  As I was reading over syntax-control.md, it was brought home 
to me that the ASDF shared syntax is initialized to the *initial syntax* 
on the host implementation, rather than the standard syntax of ANSI CL.  
My understanding is that this is done for backwards-compatibility with 
some QL systems that assume they have access to extended syntax from 
some implementation(s).  I'm concerned that this will create a 
maintenance headache going forward just so someone *else* can avoid 
making some minor clean-up.  Should we just suck it up and make the 
shared syntax start out with the initial syntax?  Why not break it now, 
and save ourselves trouble later?  Also, it seems like "initial syntax" 
is not well-defined, even on a single implementation, since ASDF might 
be loaded at arbitrary times, possibly after modifications to the 
"initial initial" readtable.  Finally, going forward, people will be 
yelling at *us* if implementations change their initial syntax.

Unless there's a really important reason to keep this, I think we should 
kill it.

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