🚀 go-pugleaf

Kevin,

I have had the exact same problems and I sympathetize with you.  I don't know of
a flag that disables bad package errors, but I have a patch for \SUBREAD which
does about what I think you want.  The fix will let you type in NS file names
without having to manually bother about escaping the colons in the host name or
typing it in as a string, but this is all it gives you -- ie, you will still
have to escape colons anywhere else where you might be using them outside of
their real purpose as package delimiters.

What the patch does is to change the code that parses package delimiters into
treating them as normal characters for the single case when the first character
of the atom is a left curly bracket.  The only potential danger that I can see
with this is that it will fail to discover a real package starting with a left
curly bracket if anybody would be foolish enough to create such a thing.  This
may seem a bit extreme to some people, but it certainly saves me a lot of
frustration by not forcing me to go through SEdit and feel stupid every five
minutes when I forget...

If you have the source of \SUBREAD (LLREAD), change:

	elseif (EQ SNX PACKAGEDELIM.RC)
	    then (GO GOTPACKAGEDELIM)
	else (GO ATOMLOOP))

into:

	elseif (EQ SNX PACKAGEDELIM.RC)
	    then (if (EQ (\GETBASECHAR \FATPNAMESTRINGP PBASE 0) (CHARCODE {))
			then (GO GOTATOMCHAR)
			else (GO GOTPACKAGEDELIM))
	else (GO ATOMLOOP))

and recompile.  Or copy ~ftp/lisp/subreadpatch.lcom from parcvax.xerox.com using
anonymous ftp.

--Lennart <Lovstrand.EuroPARC@Xerox.COM>
Rank Xerox EuroPARC, 61 Regent Street, Cambridge CB2 1AB, England