Question

I am doing some text processing, part of it is splitting words into single characters. Every character gets interned as a symbol in upper case with some frequency value assigned to it just for the sake of easiness but as one might imagine, there is a stumbling block in form of the T constant.

The solution I am looking at now is to simply use a lowercase symbol instead of upper case T, however I am wondering if there would be a quick and easy way to verify if the symbol at hand is T.

All I can think of is:

(intern (if (string= “T” (symbol-name symbol)) #\t symbol)

but that just does not look nice since string comparison is not cumbersome. Any ideas?

PS. I need all the symbols in upper case since it is less hassle to evaluate them in listener but I can live with one lowercase t.

Answer 1

You may shadow the symbol T:

CL-USER> (shadow 't)
COMMON-LISP:T
CL-USER> (let ((t 17)) t)
17

The shadowed constant T may still be referred to as cl:t.