Lyc

We have described the readtable-macro parsing mechanism of our lexer. We now illustrate the power and elegance of a recursive-descent design.

Lisp’s readtable-macro parsing mechanism, mixed with the parsing-via-coroutines mechanism presented earlier, is an ideal mechanism for lexical analysis: powerful, flexible, easily extensible, and sufficiently fast.

The idea of grouping blocks of instructions by using indentation — the off-side rule — is a powerful way of denoting program structure. We generalize it slighly, in a way that is suitable for embedding in a readtable-macro parser.

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