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.
