Parendown

7.7

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Parendown

Parendown adds weak opening parentheses to Racket in the form of a language extension. A more extensive overview of Parendown’s uses can be found in the README at GitHub.

1 The Parendown Language Extension

2 Parendown as a Library

1 The Parendown Language Extension

The parendown language is a language extension. To use it, specify another language after parendown on the #lang line, and that language will have its readtable extended with a #/ syntax that behaves according to parendown-readtable-handler.

#lang parendown racket/base

(displayln #/string-append "Hello, " "world!")

2 Parendown as a Library

There is also a parendown module which lets Racket code use some features of Parendown even when they aren’t using the #lang directly.

syntax
(pd slash-symbol stx ...)

Expands to (stx ...), where the lists of each stx have been recursively traversed to transform any tails that begin with the symbol slash-symbol into tails consisting of a single element, where that element is the list resulting from transforming the rest of that tail.

For instance, the form

(pd / begin
(displayln / string-append "Hello, " "world!")
(displayln / string-append "I can't use " "division!"))

expands to this:

(begin
(displayln (string-append "Hello, " "world!"))
(displayln (string-append "I can't use " "division!")))

syntax
(pd (stx ...))

Simply expands to (stx ...).

This is usually the result of the other case of pd. For instance, the form

(pd / begin
(displayln / string-append "Hello, " "world!")
(pd / displayln / string-append "I can't use " "division!"))

expands to this:

(begin
(displayln (string-append "Hello, " "world!"))
(pd (displayln (string-append "I can't use " "division!"))))

This contains another occurrence of pd, and this time, the code

(pd (displayln (string-append "I can't use " "division!")))

expands to this:

(displayln (string-append "I can't use " "division!"))

This behavior makes it so occurrences of the pd form can be generously added wherever they’re suspected to be needed, without causing conflicts with each other.

procedure
(parendown-readtable-handler name in) → any/c
  name : char?
  in : input-port?
(parendown-readtable-handler name
in
src
line
col
pos) → any/c
  name : char?
  in : input-port?
  src : any/c
  line : (or/c #f exact-positive-integer?)
  col : (or/c #f exact-nonnegative-integer?)
  pos : (or/c #f exact-positive-integer?)

A readtable handler procedure suitable for use with make-readtable. This handler implements a syntax very similar to (if not necessarily in full parity with) the default read behavior for the characters (, [, and {, except that it doesn’t consume the terminating ), ], or }.

When the terminating character is ] or }, the resulting list’s paren-shape syntax property is set to #\[ or #\{, respectively.

This readtable handler is sensitive to the read-accept-dot and read-accept-infix-dot parameters at the time the handler is invoked. This functionality of Parendown should be considered unstable, since it isn’t quite the same as what (, [, and { do on contemporary versions of Racket. Those characters’ default handlers are sensitive to the values of those parameters at the time the read is originally started, not the time they are encountered during the read. For instance, in contemprary versions of Racket, if (read-accept-dot) is #t at the time read is first called and then a custom reader syntax causes it to be set to #f, a subsequent occurrence of ( in the same read will be processed as though (read-accept-dot) were still #t.

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