Re: pretty-lambdas

[Daniel Weinreb <address@hidden>]

>
>
>Luke Gorrie writes:
>   > I just want to mention a simple and good-enough-for-me solution to the
>   > "lambda is too many characters" problem: have Emacs "fontify" the
>   > string "lambda" as a lambda character. Then it uses less screen space
>   > even than 'fn'.
>
In the official Lisp Machine Character Set, there was in fact a lambda 
character, mainly because
there was a lambda on the keyboard.  (I refer here to the original Lisp 
Machine keyboard,
unofficialy known as the Space Cadet Keyboard, in which Tom Knight saw 
fit to throw
restraint to the winds and put in everything anybody ever wanted, 
including, if I
recall correctly, the entire Greek alphabet.)  I remember that at least 
at one time,
we had the Lisp Machine's dialect of Lisp set up so that you could, in 
fact, use
a symbol with a print-name one-character-long consisting of the lambda 
character,
in place of the LAMBDA symbol.

-- Dan Weinreb, Dept. of Lispm History...