"Tobias C. Rittweiler" tcr@freebits.de writes:
I think I was told that the issue of two colons is not insurmountable.
I was just basing that prohibition on what I see in Clojure 1.1.0 today by evaluating
,---- | (read-string "swank::+foo+") `----
which yields
,---- | java.lang.Exception: Invalid token: swank::+foo+ `----
Note that the `symbol' function does allow constructing a symbol with the offending colons:
,---- | > (symbol "swank::+foo+") | swank::+foo+ `----
Again, though, the Clojure reader documentation warns:
A symbol can contain one or more non-repeating ':'s.
While the `symbol' function isn't enforcing that restriction, it looks like the /reader/ doesn't intend to accept such a symbol.
I have not made such a recommendation in my previous mail.
Then I misunderstood your intent. Rereading, is your proposal that there should be a reader mode that interprets characters only to resolve them to numbers and symbols? How about delimited strings?
CL should have been made to provide such a minimal reading mode, too.
Clojure, unlike ANSI CL, has the chance to make it happen.
Please try to make it happen.
I'm just coming to Clojure in the last couple of weeks (not wanting to dive in without SLIME), so I don't yet know how receptive the maintainer is to such suggestions. And first, I and others need to better understand what you're proposing.