[Larceny-users] more on read-dispatch-vec

[William D Clinger]

Ed wrote:
>       ; Symbol starters.
>       
>       (do ((c 128 (+ 1 c)))
>           ((= c 256))
>         (vector-set! read-dispatch-vec c read-dispatch-symbol-starter))
>  
>       (do ((i 0 (+ i 1)))
>           ((= i 256))
>         (if (char-alphabetic? (integer->char i))
>             (vector-set! read-dispatch-vec i read-dispatch-symbol-starter)))
> 
> Shouldn't that second do loop only need to run through 127?

As written, the two loops are independent (and the
first loop is an apparent hack, of majorly questionable
correctness).  Making the second loop depend upon
the questionable first loop would make the code even
more fragile than it is.  We don't want to increase
the fragility of this code to save a few microseconds
at initialization time.

As Felix noted earlier, this code has to go away pretty
soon anyway because it has to be rewritten for Unicode.

> BTW, is there a public repository that I can make patches against?

Only a small group of Larceny developers are allowed to
make changes to the Larceny source repository.  You can
check out the source yourself, however, and update it to
keep up with our changes.  See http://larceny.ccs.neu.edu/trac/

Will