Sharing READTABLE macro bindings?

[David McClain]

Hi Guys,

Yes, I just stumbled onto NAMED-READTABLES. Pretty neat idea. I’m just trying it out to see where the boundaries are.

But the idea that Attila suggests is a good one. It would be really neat if packages had some notion of the readtable needed for their successful compilation and activity. But then there is the question of using multiple parent packages, each with their own usage readtables.

I can see that the notion of a global *PACKAGE* and global *READTABLE* appear to be artifacts from the 1980’s. It becomes a real pickle when you have an extensible interactive system with multiprocessing.

This crazy notion of global state is a real puzzler. Haskell seems to want to ignore it and push it off into Monads. State needs to be context dependent with an interactive system. And then there is the notion of backward DYNAMIC-WIND in Scheme — unfortunately you can’t un-press the “Drop the Bomb” button….

We are still just crawling out from under rocks in the software sciences…

- DM