[slime-devel] Re: Broken readtables

[Thomas F. Burdick]

Helmut Eller writes:
 > Luke Gorrie <luke at bluetail.com> writes:
 >
 > > 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.
 > 
 > Yeah, and it's probably what 99% of the users do.  People who use
 > multiple readtables deserve to loose :-)

I'm currently working on Objective-C integration with CLOS, and the
code implementing the integration uses a normal readtable, while
ObjC-using code needs a different readtable (so far the only change is
to use :invert read-case to support camelCase ObjC method names).  The
specter of having to constantly switch readtables has made me think
about adding the ability to associate a readtable with an Emacs
buffer.

All this is to say that I think there are reasonable situations in
which this might come up.

 > All this is currently only used for SBCL and I don't know if
 > *readtable-alist* is very useful for users.  I assumed it is more
 > convenient to associate readtables with packages than to use
 > Emacs-style file variables, ala -*- readtable: ... -*-.  OTOH, file
 > variables would be handy when find-definitions opens an arbitrary
 > file; we could just look at the first line.

I think the file variables method is the way to go, maybe in
combination with grovelling for a (setf *readtable* ...) form at the
top of the file, so the common case gets handled automatically.