Character-Handling Facilities in the LISP System

Abstract

Because of the new read program, a number of facilities are being added to the LISP system to permit manipulation of single characters and print names. Machine-language functions have been provided for breaking print names down into a list of their characters, for forming a list of characters into a print name, for creating a numerical object from a list of its characters, for reading in characters one by one from an input medium, and for testing characters to see whether they are letters, numbers, operation characters, etc. A number of auxiliary objects and sub-routines are also described in this memo.