Reading unknown symbols as strings in at-exp languages

Question

I have created a module which provides various functions, including #%module-begin. I want to use it with at-exp syntax, which I can do using the following #lang line:

#lang at-exp s-exp "my-library.rkt"

However, this does not read unknown symbols as strings, as would happen for example when using the scribble/text language. How can I provide this functionality from my library, to save me writing quote marks around all my strings?

I think it may have something to do with the #%top function. Perhaps I can require it somehow from scribble/text and then provide it from my library?

Answer 1

What scribble/text does, is it starts reading the file in "text" mode, whereas at-exp starts reading the file in "racket" mode. Messing with #%top is not what you want here. To do the same thing as scribble/text, you would need a version of at-exp that starts in text mode. That doesn't exist (yet) though.

The function read-syntax-inside from scribble/reader does this. However, you will have to define your own #lang language that uses it. For that, you might find this documentation helpful, but there's no quick answer.

Update:

I looked at the implementation of scribble/text, and the answer seems a lot quicker than I thought it would be. Something like this should work:

my-library/lang/reader.rkt:

#lang s-exp syntax/module-reader

my-library/main

#:read        scribble:read-inside
#:read-syntax scribble:read-syntax-inside
#:whole-body-readers? #t
#:info        (scribble-base-reader-info)

(require (prefix-in scribble: scribble/reader)
         (only-in scribble/base/reader scribble-base-reader-info))

Testing it:

#lang my-library
This is text
@(list 'but 'this 'is 'not)

I tested this with my-library/main.rkt re-providing everything from racket/base.