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From: RG <rNOSPA...@flownet.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Simple Lisp Support
Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:22:00 -0800
Organization: Amalgamated Widgets Unlimited
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References: <864o9b2z9q.fsf@jeromebaum.com> <igq2v0$doe$1@news.eternal-september.org>
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In article <igq2v0$do...@news.eternal-september.org>,
 Tim Bradshaw <t...@tfeb.org> wrote:

> On 2011-01-14 17:03:45 +0000, Jerome Baum said:
> > 
> > Wow, that was sooo badly ripped out of context:
> 
> No, it wasn't, in fact. Yes, there are only a rather small number of 
> single-letter names, but the *actual* context was using one such, 
> transiently, to do an operation which is being repeated many times in a 
> particlar session.  It's not actually hard to type a little temporary 
> definition of L meaning "load the system I'm working on in this REPL" 
> and to remember that definition for the duration of the session, rather 
> then repeatedly cutting and pasting whatever invocation is needed to 
> reload it.  I very often define a bunch of such transient things, often 
> L meaning "reload <whatever>", E meaning <edit whatever>, and TS 
> meaning <run tests>.  It annoys me occasionally that the people who 
> designed Lisp thought it was OK to usurp T for use by the language, in 
> fact.
> 
> I'm kind of depressed that people might use interactive languages 
> without this sort of transient definition of very short commands, and 
> find the argument that the "set-up cost of defining the 
> single-character macro and then memorizing the mapping between the 
> character and the command" might be too high pretty unimpressive

I have been doing most of my lisp coding in CCL/MCL since 1984.  Since 
the beginning, CCL/MCL has provided an IDE where evaluating a form 
requires nothing more than placing the cursor on the close-paren of the 
form with the mouse (or selecting a range of forms) and pressing the 
ENTER key.  With that capability at your disposal, defining a transient 
definition is almost never worth the bother.

rg