The position in a stream

[Goheeca]

I have a question, whether the position in:

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(set-macro-character #\! #'(lambda (s c) (format t "~s:~a~%" c (file-position s)) (values)))

is determined by the standard during reading from a string:

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(read-from-string "(1 ! 2)")

[Ramarren]

I have a strong feeling that this is not an use case anyone writing the standard thought of. I would say strictly speaking no, since the only requirement is "as if read had been called on an input stream containing those same characters. ", without requiring that the stream is fresh, although I don't really see how the stream could be reused in practice.

And in any case the file position glossary entry says that for character streams the requirement is only the the position is monotonic, so the exact value is definitely not specified.

[pjstirling]

Er, what is the problem here?

The obvious implementation of READ-FROM-STRING is in terms of MAKE-STRING-INPUT-STREAM and READ (looking at the sbcl source this is definitely the case here, in the non-compiler-macro case)

FILE-POSITION should probably be named STREAM-POSITION, because it is defined in terms of streams, so it should give you an appropriate value.

[Goheeca]

Hm
I'm writing an indentation-sensitive reader macro, which works great, but I've invented usage of that in a nested invocation, which is a bit different and it needs to know where is the begin of line where the macro has invoked.
So I need some generalization (more characters) of read/unread/peek in both direction (back and forth) or an elegant way to find out where in the string it leads to invocation of my macro.
// I tried this with SBCL and CLISP both work, but for example a lisp by ufasoft (and they claim it's CL*) in the mobile version it leads to a type-error that on the string-stream can't do that *on the other hand file-position exceptional situations disallow this behavior.

[pjstirling]

Filing a bug against the implementation is the appropriate thing to do here, but since their last build was in 2009 that may not get you anywhere.

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(defun stream-position (stream)
  #+ufasoft-lisp
  (if (string-stream-p stream)
      (string-input-stream-index stream)
      ;; else
      (file-position stream))
  #-ufasoft-lisp
  (file-position stream))


might work, I get `make: *** No rule to make target `lispeng/lispmsg.mc', needed by `lispmsg.h'. Stop.` when I try to compile the runtime so I can't check