Talk:S-expressions: Difference between revisions

:can you elaborate the difference? the solution should easy enough to make it useful practically. this should not be a demo on how complex it is to implement an s-expression parser that follows everyone's wishes, but it should provide a practical starting point for those who really do need an s-expression parser for their project. if the data handling mechanism goes beyond what you would normally do in J, then maybe it isn't the right approach. unfortunately i find J very hard to read, so i can't really understand the code.--[[User:EMBee|eMBee]] 03:52, 19 October 2011 (UTC)

::The difference between what? Between the parser that handles the list syntax and the parser that handles the atoms? If that is what you are asking about: The parser that handles the list syntax returns a list which itself contains things which are either contained parsed lists or strings. The strings are the sequence of characters which appeared in the input -- things like data (four characters), "quoted data" (13 characters) or 123 (three characters). The parser that handles the atoms is responsible for converting "quoted data" to an eleven character string and for converting 123 to an integer. The difference is that the list parser does not concern itself with what the strings represent and the data parser does not concern itself with the list structure. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 22:44, 19 October 2011 (UTC)