Re: pretty-lambdas

[Scott McKay <address@hidden>]

At 9:45 PM -0500 12/3/02, Daniel Weinreb wrote:
>>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...

There was a hack for #\lambda was actually a little cooler
than just being able to use it in place of the symbol 'lambda'.
It was implemented as a reader macro that let you lose the
left paren before the lambda and the right paren than would
have closed it.  That is -- using ^ for #\lambda -- you could
write this:

  ^ (x y) (+ x y)

I think that this might have been commented out of the usual
Genera build, tho'.