Yeah, I know. Unless I made ssyntax way more powerful, I couldn't put stuff like "" or [] in there. I'm okay with that, at least for now. But since it's possible to put ` ' , and ,@ in the ssyntax, I plan to do that. Makes it more hackable in Arc, you know?
Also, since I plan to expand ssyntax at read-time in PyArc, what's the distinction between ssyntax and reader macros, besides the fact that Arc can't define reader macros, and reader macros are more powerful?
There's nothing stopping Arc from having reader macros too, except that at this point there isn't a good standard; it takes Racket calls, and the more I learn about Racket and reader macros, the more I think it has an incomplete standard too. :-p I want to make a reader macro that stops when it reaches a symbol-terminating character--but wait, there are ways to specify symbol-terminating characters, but I see no way to check for them. Time to hack the language core... if only I could. ^^
"what's the distinction between ssyntax and reader macros, besides..."
I think the distinction is how much you're parsing the stream one character at a time (in which case you can dispatch on reader macros) and how much you're parsing it in chunks. Infix syntax always looks like a chunk to me, but as I was saying, infix operators could be implemented as reader macros if we kept/passed enough state in the reader. There could be no distinction at all.
