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user-inactivated  ·  3287 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bugski: Problem with Drafts Discovered FYI

I saw a horrible solution to a similar problem in a Common Lisp codebase that shall remain nameless. They defined a read macro to look up a token in a hash table and use that as the object read, so a symbol could be given the name |Save draft?|, then entered in the hash table with the key "draft", and the string "$draft" would be read as the symbol |Save draft?|. It was probably the grossest thing I've ever seen in a CL codebase, but it did solve the problem of having to present friendly strings to people who were not lisp programmers familiar with the project with minimal changes.

I have no idea whether Arc has read macros, and it's probably a bad idea to do that if it does, but it has been done.