Re: Growing a data type?

Ali wrote:
I think Guy Steele has more interesting things in mind than
reimplementing strings.

I'm not Guy Steele, I have boring things in mind such as seeing if
this theme can be extended across to the area of data types.

Why should I care? Its not interesting to you, but in case you've
missed the fact, I'll tell you:
Programs are pretty pointless without a concept of data. That is why I
find the question both interesting and important.

---

I may have misread your post, but I see it as both a) condescending,
and b) lacking anything interesting in itself.

"I don't expect this to be answered" is already condescending.

When I posted my answer, other posts already gave you the answer to the original question: That is, Common Lisp has all the rope you need to (re)implement strings yourself, including a read syntax for literal values. This is actually not so unusual to do this in Common Lisp for other kinds of data types.

Although I don't mind either of those properties on their own, when
combined, a magical process occurs in my brain where I start thinking
less of you, no matter how good a Lisp hacker you are.

Yes, that's a problem with Lispers: They sometimes sound arrogant when they are actually just stating facts. ;)

And no, my question wasn't the best in the world, it was merely aimed
at producing some interesting conversation.

There is no real seed for an interesting discussion here: Common Lisp supports what you need to (re)implement such data types. (Although read macros could have more convenient support, but there are people actively working on this.)

Since Guy Steele was one of the main designers of Common Lisp, he certainly knows all this, so it's most certainly a given that he had something more interesting in mind. That's all I wanted to say, and that's actually all I said.


Pascal

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