Re: defining new character names?

[Matthias Koeppe]

"Lars J. Aas" <address@hidden> writes:

> I'd like to be able to do something like this:
>
> (define-character "paren-close" #\051) ; 051 is ")"
>
> and then later
>
> (string-index line #\paren-close)
>
> I can of course define a normal variable for this, but then
> it won't shine from the usage that it is a character in the
> way the above does.

Why not use the name `paren-close-character' then.

#\ is read-syntax for literal character constants.  It is not a "type
annotation".  (If you define constant numeric variables like `pi', the
name will not start with a digit either.)

> I've looked in libguile/chars.{c,h} and the guile docs, but
> didn't find any obvious way to do this.  Is it possible?

> The reason i'd like to do this is that inserting #\) in the
> scheme file makes the vim "%" command unusable over those
> blocks (and it's not as easy on the eye either), and there was
> no alternate name for that char other than using the octal
> ascii value.

I think it's a bad idea to change the language only to make sure that
a simplistic editor implementation works with it.  File a bug report
with vim instead; I'm sure it is easy to fix.

Regards,

-- 
Matthias Köppe -- http://www.math.uni-magdeburg.de/~mkoeppe