Hello Quizzers,

I'm a newbie in Lisp (have already finished the ANSI Common Lisp book, made some tries with programming as well, and I'm searching the answer to this question I have : could it be possible to "enhance" the reader in order to have in lisp "enhanced strings".

That is : by just doing something once at the beginning of a lisp file (some call, ...), being able to have all the strings replaced by another string (or another form).

Something like this :

;;; beginning of file

(enhanced-strings:start)

...
...

(defun some-function (x y)
"This returned string is an enhanced string and the value of x and y will be replaced 'a la ruby' : x=${x}, y =${y}")

You see what I mean ....

This could be an interesting quiz, but first of all, will an ANSI compliant implementation let redefine the reader to alter the meaning of strings ?

I know I can add macro characters, play with macro character dispatching functions, ... but what about "overriding" the reader to intercept strings and change them, as for the above example, with :

(format t "This returned string is an enhanced string and the value of x and y will be replaced 'a la ruby' : x=~a, y =~a") x y)

thanks in advance for your answers, both on feasibility and/or complete answers to this "unofficial" quiz ;-)

And oh, if I definitely bothered you by sending this message on the wrong list, please let me know what would be the most natural list/newsgroup to post this message on ?

Thanks in advance,

A lisp beginner,

--
Laurent PETIT