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how to document yellow page entries, belated discussion by REM



I totally disagree with your statement that *any* use of ;-style
comments in an otherwise readable and printable file is bad programming
style.  If there is some reason you want to process or save such
comments when the file is read, it is a trivial matter to redefine the
character macro for #\; to pack the comment line into a string and
return it in some form that the reader will find unobjectionable.

So I see no reason why ;-style comments are not a good vehicle for
header information in yellow pages files.  The default Common Lisp
reader discards these things, but that's what you want most of the time.
If you want a program to extract and save this stuff, building a reader
to do that is well within the capabilities of most beginning Lisp
programmers.

-- Scott