[Gcl-devel] reading symbols and numbers from a file

[Robert Dodier]

Hello,

I am hoping to find a way to read symbols, numbers, and
maybe strings from a data file of the form

  1728 Foo 3.1459 FOO
  bar  128 9.7 96321

and so on. The function read folds all symbols into uppercase --
Foo and foo yield FOO. I would like to find a way to get read
to invert case.

In Clisp and CMUCL I can get the desired behavior via
readtable-case. However the code which works for those two,
namely (setf (readtable-case local-table) :invert),
fails with "Cannot expand the SETF form (READTABLE-CASE
LOCAL-TABLE)" in GCL.

I am aware that there has been some work on readtable-case
in GCL recently. Be that as it may, I need something that 
works for previous revisions (let's say anything in the past
2 years) as well.

The larger goal here is to write a function which loads
a data file organized into rows and columns. If someone has
already written such a function for GCL, I would be 
interested to hear about it.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this problem.

Robert Dodier

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